


Ghost Boy

by turbomun



Category: Wreck-It Ralph (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-14 02:55:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 19
Words: 77,372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11199000
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/turbomun/pseuds/turbomun
Summary: One night, Turbo went to bed in frustration, wondering what he could possibly do about that Road Blasters game. When he woke up, thirty years had passed. He was told that he'd nearly died when Turbo Time was unplugged and had now been reformatted for use in a new game called Sugar Rush...but people are treating him strangely, and he feels like there's something he can't remember...





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was originally written between November 2012 and January 2013, and was posted on FFN and Tumblr, where it proved to be decently popular. With Wreck-It Ralph 2 coming out in just over a year, I figured that it was high time to go back and fix a few of the things in this story that were bugging me. If it's all set to become AU soon, I might as well make it a good AU, right?
> 
> If you've read this fic in the past, this is not a complete rewrite, but there will still be some considerable alterations. If you've never read this fic...well, it's about Turbo, and that's all I'll say for now...

“ _Memory is the great deceiver. Perhaps there are some individuals whose memories act like tape recordings, daily records of their lives complete in every detail, but I am not one of them. My memory is a patchwork of occurrences, of discontinuous events roughly sewn together: The parts I remember, I remember precisely, whilst other sections seem to have vanished completely._ ”

\- Neil Gaiman, _Murder Mysteries_

* * *

 

“I think that should be everything.”

“It took a pretty long time.”

“Well, he had more junk in his code than cavities in a candy store, of course it took a long time! No wonder he went nuts. Do yourself a favor, squirt, and don’t ever try the DIY approach to character mods.”

“Wasn’t plannin’ on it.”

“Maybe he wasn’t, either…”

“We don’t know one way or the other, and now, neither does he. That’s the whole point. You _did_ delete that stuff, right?”

“Uh…no.”

“ _No?!_ ”  
  
“I couldn’t! It was all tangled up with the rest of him, he would have fallen apart if I had! So I just…separated it. Moved it to where it can’t bother anybody.”

“I don’t believe this. It would be _better_ if he just fell apart!”

“Ralph!”

“Don’t you ‘Ralph’ me! You know that this is a bad idea!”

“At least we can pull the plug easily enough if the need arises, but I have to agree. I haven’t seen anyone putting themselves in danger more deliberately since Dunderson wandered into the Cy-bug nest on the thirty-seventh floor.”

“But doesn’t everyone deserve a second chance…?”

“…no.”

“I’m gonna have to say no on that.”

“You guys! Quit it, okay?! This is my game, and I say we’re doing this! And it _will_ work!”

“Whether it’ll work or not, it’s already done.” 

“Doesn’t that mean that he’s going to be waking up soon?”

“Yes.”

“Then we better make sure that he’s not by himself when it happens.”

“We’re going to regret this.”

“No way, Stinkbrain. You’ll see. Now, come on, and if you’re scared, just hide behind me…”


	2. Nothing lasts forever

"Hey, look, it's the ghost boy."

Turbo might have looked somewhat dead, being near-frozen the way he was – with round glassy eyes staring at nothing and ungloved hands wrapped around a cold milkshake glass – but he was neither deaf nor dumb, and he narrowed his eyes. "I can hear you," he stated hollowly.

The closest voice, the one that seemed to be directly behind him, feigned a gasp. "Well, would you look at that! He's still alive!"

A few other people laughed, not all of them cruelly. Being an arcade game character in those early days, a sense of humor about technological limitations was required. Everyone complained about the bizarre bodies that they had been shoved into by their programmers, and everyone teased everyone else about the very same thing. Back when his game had first been added to the arcade, over six years ago now, Turbo had been one of the most human-looking characters around in a sea of Pac-Mans and Q-Berts and Space Invaders. But the funny thing about those characters was, they possessed a sort of appeal despite their simplicity. They weren't the most realistic designs in the world, obviously, but there was nothing unsettling about them, either.

That wasn't so for Turbo.

From the very start, mirrors had been his enemies. White, white skin; an overly toothy yellow grin; a snub nose, slightly darker than the rest of his face; nearly black hollows around yellow eyes. Why did he have dark circles that made his eyes look so sunken, giving his entire face a skeletal appearance? His only guess that it had been his developers' attempt to differentiate his facial features from his skin tone, but then again, Jet and Set didn't have that particular feature, and they didn't look half as creepy as he did. Sure, their designs came across as being very simplified, but they seemed to make themselves understood just fine.

Anyway, Turbo had been living with the nickname "ghost boy" ever since more complex characters like the Fix-It Felix Jr. crowd had been plugged in, when suddenly everybody got yet another reason to make fun of him – like they hadn’t had enough ammunition already. But he knew that today, the references to his "death" weren't being made because of how he looked. It was because of the new game that had been plugged in last week.

"Have you said your goodbyes yet, ghost boy?" sneered the first, ill-meaning heckler. Turbo didn't bother turning around to see who it was. It could have been anyone, really; they were all thinking the same thing. "Now that RoadBlasters is here, you're as good as unplugged. This arcade is updating fast, and now that the gamers can race without having to look at your ugly mug, they don't need Turbo Time anymore."

Turbo squeezed his hands around his milkshake glass. Condensation was pooling beneath his flesh, drenching his palms with frigid water. "Leave me alone," he said tonelessly.

The voice snickered. "Fine, fine. If it's alone time you want, ghost boy, I wouldn't worry too much about that. You'll be getting plenty of it from now on!"

A bitter lump solidified in his throat, and he hurriedly took a sip of his milkshake to gulp down the potential for tears before it started. The action left a strange taste in his mouth as whipped cream and chocolate syrup mingled with loneliness and remorse.

"Heads up, Turbo." The racer lifted his elbows as Tapper came around to swipe the bar with a damp cloth. Turbo couldn't see anything marring the gleaming surface, not even the most minuscule speck of dust, but Tapper seemed to be lost when he wasn't cleaning compulsively. The bartender smiled sympathetically. "Don't mind those guys, kid. You know that they're just messing with you."

"I'm not a  _kid_ ," snapped Turbo. "And I don't care about them. What I care about is that stupid Road Blasters game and what it's going to do to me!"

A long time ago, when Turbo Time had first been plugged in, Turbo had gone forth to try and make friends with every confidence that he could do so. The other residents of Litwak’s seemed nice enough at first, always eager to make new characters feel welcome…but as the months passed, he began to notice something in their smiles that he didn’t quite trust. It was ages before he realized that at some point, their genuine friendliness had curdled into mocking, and everything about him had become a running joke: his tone of voice, his endless excited talk about his latest racing victories, his tendency to never catch on to the fact that he wasn’t wanted…and of course, his appearance. But up until now, he had been able to offset the snide comments with reminders that he belonged to  _the most popular game in the arcade_ , thank you very much. So what if he had been conceived at a time when game designers had only very basic color palettes, and so what if he usually felt like everyone else was communicating in a secret code and he hadn’t been given the right translation key? It was  _his_  game that the arcade patrons lined up to play. Not Pac-Man, not Q*bert, not Space Invaders: Turbo Time. It was the one thing that he had going for him, so he made sure to rub it into everyone’s faces whenever the opportunity arose

It had taken less than a week for RoadBlasters to snatch what little he did have away from him. There were no characters in that game, nothing with a personality, but did the gamers care about that? No, they only had eyes for the fancy-pants glitter graphics. And there wasn't a thing that Turbo could do about it. He could flash his lopsided grin as much as he pleased, shout his customary catchphrase, "Turbo-Tastic!" at the top of his lungs, but at the end of the day his coding would still make him look like a freaky white racer…like a ghost boy. It was a part of the program, and it couldn't be changed.

Tapper sighed. "It's tough all over. All of these game companies keep trying to best each other, and you never know if you're gonna be plugged in tomorrow or if some hotshot new guy is gonna swoop in and take your place." He withdrew his cloth and leaned back to admire his handiwork. "But at the end of the day, all games get unplugged eventually. Nothing lasts forever."

"Easy for you to say!" Turbo scowled and shoved away his half-full milkshake glass, wiping his damp hands on his jumpsuit. "You've only been plugged in a year, and there's nobody around to steal your thunder! "

Tapper only rolled his eyes, never leaving his role of the sagely advice-giving bartender. "Nothing lasts forever, kid," he repeated, before moving away to serve up root beer to a few other customers.

" _I'm not a kid_ ," Turbo hissed under his breath, dropping from the bar stool where he had been perched. He left a fistful of coins on the bar, but only enough to pay for the milkshake; there was no way that he'd be giving that know-it-all Tapper a tip tonight. Tapper didn't understand. Nobody understood what Turbo was going through; no one appreciated his achievements or bothered to wonder how he might feel when they called him "ghost boy."

They said that he liked to boast, that he took pleasure in hogging all of the gamers' attention. Well, they weren't considering the fact that maybe – just maybe – that was the extent of the positive attention that Turbo ever got.

* * *

 

Turbo Time was a cramped little world consisting of a racetrack and little else. The grass extended slightly farther than the players could see, and hidden behind the stands were three small buildings; these were the miniscule garages where the three programmed karts were stored, and also where the game's racers bunked down every night. No one lived here except for the lead character and two NPCs. The false grandstands were only filled with rows upon rows of mottled neutral-colored pixels, since the programmers hadn't even bothered to put in enough coding to make them real spectators. It was deserted, and lonely, and it often felt just plain creepy when you were waking up in the middle of the night and you were all alone in the dark and despite all your bravado, you really did feel like a kid…not that Turbo would know.

This was the place that he called home.

Over by the "neighborhood," Jet and Set were leaning over their cars, playfully jostling one another, and laughing. Turbo's mood darkened further when he saw them. Jet and Set claimed that they were just as lonely as he was, but he figured that couldn't be true, because they were identical twins who had each other no matter what. Not just identical twins, but  _exact duplicates_. From the time that their game had been first plugged in, Turbo had never seen one of them without the other.

Jet was the first to notice him, and he halted in his roughhousing long enough for his brother to nearly snatch away his helmet. "You’re back!" he exclaimed, waving.

Set paused, gave up the game, and adopted a too-cool-for-school pose leaning against his car. “How was Tapper’s?”

"Same as always," grumbled Turbo, squaring his shoulders and fully intending to pass by them without a second glance. Jet and Set instinctively were supposed to instinctively regard him as their leader; that was another part of the programming. But lately there’d been a rift gradually opening up between them – or more specifically, between Turbo and Set, the first- and third-place racers. Jet, stuck in the middle, was left to desperately try and keep the peace between them, like a teacher trying to separate two troublesome kids…

 _Except I’m not a kid_.

Technically, all three Turbo Time racers were approximately the same age – somewhere around fourteen or fifteen years old. Turbo was clueless as to why they had been condemned to live out their lives as teenagers; if their game had once had a plot that depended upon them being so young, it had been scrapped long before release. And it just made the other denizens of the arcade look down on them that much more. Being an adult was normal, and even ageless creatures were nothing to make a fuss about, but teenagers? Oh, look at those silly boys, trotting around the arcade and thinking they're people! How cute! But remember, don't use too many big words around them, because they're just kids…

Turbo hated being called "kid" almost as much as he hated being called a ghost boy.

"Did something happen?" asked Jet, approaching the lead character with nervously clasped hands. The genuine concern in his voice caused Turbo's temples to throb with anger.

"You  _know_  what's the matter!" he spat. "Both of you already know! We haven't been played more than half a dozen times since RoadBlasters got plugged in, and yet you two are just standing here and messing around like everything's peachy-keen!"

Jet and Set exchanged a glance, then shrugged in unison. Set rolled his eyes when he thought Turbo wasn’t looking.

"What’s the big deal?" he demanded. "This happens every time a new game gets plugged in. The gamers go ga-ga for a few days, but then eventually they trickle back…"

"You don't get it, do you?!" shouted Turbo. "We've been  _replaced_! Now that there's a glitter-graphics racing game to play, nobody needs us anymore! We're as good as unplugged!"

Jet cringed. "Th-that's not true…is it?"

"Of course it's not," Set assured his brother, sending a glare in Turbo's direction. "Turbo's just throwing a hissy fit because now he doesn't get to stand up on a podium and shove his trophy in our faces a hundred times a day. Seriously, Turbo, we lose all the time and the gamers never pay much attention to us, and you don't see us throwing temper tantrums!"

"That's because you two are just NPCs!" Turbo felt a sudden urge to throw something on the ground…his helmet, maybe, if it wasn't for the fact that he was so anal about removing his helmet. He had enough problems being the local ghost boy without people remarking on his perfectly spherical bald head, as well. “Of course it doesn’t matter if you’re just the third-place racer, but it’s _different_ for me!”

Set’s jaw clenched, but before he could start an argument, his twin butted in to hopefully steer the conversation in a more productive direction.

"Turbo, we understand that you're upset!" interrupted Jet pleadingly. "This is our game, too. No matter what happens, we've all gotta stick together. We're trying to be your friends here…"

"…but you make it hard for us, since you're so arrogant and selfish all the time!" finished Set. "Would it kill you to actually be nice to another person, for just once in your life!"

Turbo's fists retracted into tight wads at his sides. "You don't get ahead in life by being nice!" he growled. "You don't  _win_  by being nice! And being nice doesn't get you much in this arcade. We're probably about to be unplugged anyway, so why should I start kissing up to everyone now?!" And with that, he shoved the twins out of his way and stormed off to his solitary little garage.

It wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair!

His life was being ruined by the limitations of his programming. If only his designers hadn't made him look so bizarre…if only they'd given him a personality that could transcend even the most alluring of glitter-graphics! He had the ability to achieve something great, he could feel it…maybe with just a few tweaks in his code, things would be different…

When Turbo went to bed that night, curling up in order to cram himself into the oversized tire where he slept, hot tears of frustration were pressing at his eyes. He felt weak and powerless and alone – he felt like a kid, and he couldn't allow himself that kind of indulgence. You could afford to be a kid when you had parents or guardians, or someone who would ensure that your immaturity wouldn't mean dire consequences. He didn't have anyone, and that was just how he liked it. He was strong enough to take care of himself. No one would ever slow him down or get in his way…

"I'm Turbo," he murmured to himself. "The greatest racer ever. I am not a kid. And I'm not going to let myself get stopped by something like a bunch of zeroes and ones, no way, no how."

There was a saying about never going to bed while you were angry, because the time could be better spent staying awake and plotting your revenge. Turbo was certainly simmering as he tucked himself in for the night, but he allowed his eyes to close regardless. He would do something about this. Something so great that it would earn him the adulation of not only the gamers, but the other characters in Litwak's Arcade as well. And then no one would ever dare to call him a ghost boy or a  _kid_  again.

As he drifted off, the only thing he had yet to decide was what exactly his extraordinary task would be…


	3. Thirty years is a while

Turbo had always been a notoriously light sleeper, prone to jerking into half-alertness at the slightest provocation during the night, and Jet and Set had often accused him of sleep-muttering, as well. If there was any benefit to being stuck in a state of perpetual restlessness, it was that he could wake up without too much trouble when it was time to start work in the morning. It didn't take much; a stretch, a yawn, a quick change of clothes, and he'd be ready to begin the day. Which was why it was so perplexing that as he came around this morning, the bleary fuzzy-headedness of sleep refused to retreat.

He groaned, shifting in bed slightly, eyelids twitching against his cheeks. He felt dreadful, like that one time where a player had run him off the track and into a wall and he'd gotten a concussion that the program had taken far too long to clear up.  _What was in that milkshake last night?_ he wondered groggily.

"Turbo…hey, Turbo…."

He attempted to press his ears into the pillow. Whose was that voice, anyway? It didn't sound like Jet or Set, but at the same time, it was familiar. He could almost place it, but not quite…

"Time to wake up now, Turbo…"

Turbo's nose twitched. Why was he smelling something sweet all of a sudden? Was that his pillow? The aroma put him in mind of…marshmallows.

And from there, it took him about five seconds to realize that this was not his bed, and he was not in his room, and definitely not in his game.

Turbo snapped to attention and sat up as straight as he could – or at least, he tried to, but dark swirling spots obstructed his vision almost immediately. He collapsed back down to his pillow in an instant, dizzy. His stomach lurched.

"Woah, hey, easy now!" exclaimed the voice again. Turbo squinted up suspiciously. A man – that is, a human man who actually looked like a human – was leaning over the proper, non-giant-tire bed, flickering concern in his baby blue eyes. The letters "FF" were stitched on the cap pulled over his neatly parted brown hair, but more telling than that, a golden hammer was dangling from the tool belt at his side.

"F…Fix-It Felix?” he said weakly, his brow furrowing. He’d known Felix for years; they seemed to run into each other a lot, and Felix was one of the few people Turbo knew who’d never made fun of him, probably because Felix was way too nice to make fun of anybody. But his presence here only made things even more perplexing.

"That's me." Fix-It Felix smiled nervously, rocking back and forth on his feet.

"What are you doing here?" Turbo glanced around at his surroundings, willing his blurry vision to tighten. "Where  _is_  here?"

From what he could gather, "here" appeared to be an elegant guest room of some sort. There was a vanity table with a mirror, a wardrobe, and the bed that he was lying in, but no personal items to speak of. Upon closer examination, he realized that all of the furnishings and even the walls themselves were constructed of edible materials, mostly various kinds of sweets. Even his bed, as comfortable as it was, felt suspiciously as if it might be utilizing a sponge cake mattress.

He rubbed his eyes. There was so much  _detail_  – he had never seen graphics like this before, not even in that stupid RoadBlasters. "Is this supposed to be Candy Land or something?" he asked.

Fix-It Felix shook his head, his smile slipping a notch. "You're in a game called Sugar Rush," he explained. "You wouldn't know it."

"Huh? I'm in a new game?" Turbo propped himself up on his elbows, this time having more success in keeping his balance. "How did I get here?"

"Welllll…this game isn't exactly new," answered Felix, ignoring Turbo's second question intentionally or otherwise. "I mean, it's been around for a few years."

"A  _few_   _years_? That's not even possible. I've lived in this arcade for six years and I've never even heard of a game called Sugar Rush before," declared Turbo. His eyes swayed around the room warily. "What's going on around here?"

Felix released a slow breath. "Look, friend, I don't want to shock you too much here…it's, um, it's been a while."

Turbo looked dubious. "How long is 'a while?'"

"Uhhh…welllll…" The handyman rubbed the back of his neck uncomfortably. "Some people would say thirty years is a while…"

Turbo felt his heart jolt involuntarily. " _Thirty years_...what the…!"

He tried to jump out of bed. In his mind, he saw the move executed perfectly; he could practically feel his feet hitting the floor effortlessly, nearly heard his own voice demanding answers from Fix-It. In reality, it didn't work out nearly as well. As soon as he was in an upright position, his dizziness smacked into him at top speed, and his trembly legs were suddenly insufficient to support him. He collapsed against the side of the bed.

"Woah – easy, Turbo, easy!" Felix knelt down at the fallen racer's side and gripped his arm gently. "Are you all right? Jiminy jaminy…"

"Owww, my head…" Turbo groaned and raised a shaky hand to his forehead. This headache could certainly give that concussion a run for its money. "I-it feels like someone gave me a full-frontal lobotomy!"

Felix smiled sympathetically – or was it anxiously? – but he didn't say anything as he helped Turbo back into bed.

"You shouldn't try getting up yet," Felix warned. "We've, um, had to do some recoding work on you…your body needs time to recover."

"Why did you have to do recoding work on me?!" demanded Turbo, his mind far from appeased despite his body's weak state. "Why was I asleep for thirty years?! What's going on?!"

At that moment, the door was kicked down by a blonde woman clad in imposing black armor. She was probably taller than both Felix and Turbo combined, and she also had an extremely large gun, which she proceeded to aim at Turbo's face. "I heard something fall!" she barked. "What's happening in here, Felix?! Are you hurt?!"

Turbo yelped fearfully and recoiled into the pillow. His head protested against the sudden movement, but there was no way that he was going to just sit still with this maniac lady pointing a blaster at him.

Luckily, Felix came to the rescue, scrambling in front of the woman with his hands outstretched. "Tamora, stop! Everything's fine, he just fell out of bed! Calm down!"

The woman glared at the terrified Turbo, seemed to conclude from his shuddering limbs and lack of weaponry that he wasn't a threat, and reluctantly holstered her gun.

Felix turned back to Turbo with steepled fingers and a guilty smile on his face, unsuccessfully trying to convince the racer that there was no cause for alarm. "It's all right, Turbo. This is my wife, Sergeant Tamora Jean Calhoun. She can be a little aggressive, but she won't hurt you…unless you do anything bad, that is, but you wouldn't do anything like that, would you?"

Turbo's round yellow eyes didn't move from the soldier woman. With the way she was staring at him, it was abundantly clear that she was expecting him to do something worthy of punishment. It was bizarre, quite frankly. He might have looked a little creepy in the face, but he was tiny and slender, and he didn't even have a car to bolster him. But judging by the look on her face, he could have been a potential mass murderer.

All Turbo said was, "You're  _married_? To this lady? What the what?"

Felix forced a chuckle.

"What happened? I thought I heard something breaking…" A pair of large hazel eyes, presumably connected to the little-girl voice that had spoken, peeked around the edge of the broken door. They fell upon Turbo nervously. "He's awake?"

"You can come in, Vanellope," called Felix. "It's okay."

A young girl with a black ponytail swinging behind her head padded into the room, none too eagerly. Her head and eyes were disproportionately huge – clearly, her designers had been shooting for maximum cuteness when they'd created her. When she noticed Turbo studying her curiously, she met his gaze with an expression that, as best he could tell, was somewhere between Felix’s overbearing concern and the soldier lady’s overbearing suspicion.

"Who are you?" asked Turbo.

The girl flinched – or at least, he thought she did, for a split second. But if she’d really flinched, she checked herself so quickly that it left him doubting the accuracy of his eyes. “I’m Vanellope,” she told him. “But I know who you are, Turbo.”

_Why would she know that?_ He was the most popular game in the arcade among its players, but amidst other characters, he was a laughable little nobody. Why would anyone have heard of him after… _thirty years?_ And what had happened during that time?

He struggled to think back. He’d gone to Tapper’s, gotten a milkshake, gotten made fun of, gotten in an argument with the twins…and that was it. His most recent memory was going to bed last night ( _but it wasn’t last night, was it?_ ). It was like he’d just slept three decades away without even dreaming.

His head began to pound, and he felt a staticky tingling start up in his limbs. It was becoming increasingly apparent that some information was being withheld from him. Why was there a thirty-year gap in his memory that, try as he might, he could only access as a complete blank? What was he missing?

And now they were all staring at him again. He couldn’t tell what they were thinking, something he’d experienced before that usually frustrated him, but currently just freaked him out.

"Wh-what's wrong? Why are you all looking at me like that?" Turbo began to scoot himself off of the bed uneasily, slightly stronger now. "Look, I get it. I'm not wanted here. Let me just go back to my own game, and I'll be out of your way…"

"You don't have your own game anymore," stated the soldier lady gruffly.

Turbo froze.

Felix came forward then, clasping his hands. "Let me try to shed some light on this situation for you, Turbo. I know this is going to come as a shock to you…but Turbo Time was unplugged a long time ago. It happened very, ah, unexpectedly. Everyone thought you were dead, but then we stumbled across you, though you were badly damaged from everything that happened. So we patched you up and brought you here…"

Turbo was wondering if somehow his software had been brought to a grinding halt. He couldn't have twitched a muscle if he wanted to. "Impossible…" he gasped. "W-we were the most popular game in the arcade…!"

"Thirty years ago," corrected the soldier lady. "Things change."

"I did my best to get you back in working order, with the help of Vanellope here," continued Felix, patting the shoulder of the little girl. "There's going to be a few gaps in your memory…but nothing important. You've hardly been alive…"

"What about Jet and Set?" Turbo blurted.

Felix blinked. "Excuse me?"

"Jet and Set? My friends?! The other racers?!" Panic surged up in Turbo's throat. "If you found me, then you must have found them too…right?"

Felix and the soldier lady exchanged a look, and a touch of sympathy came to the face of the little girl. "I'm sorry, Turbo," murmured Felix. "We didn't find them. They're gone."

The blood drained from Turbo's head, and slowly, haltingly, he lowered himself back down on the bed.

_Turbo Time was unplugged a long time ago._

_Things change._

_We didn't find them. They're gone…_

Jet and Set were two of the most annoying people that he'd ever met. He was usually so irritated by them, by the way that they stuck together like glue, even the little things like how they finished each other's sentences. Last night ( _no, not last night, thirty years ago_ ) Set had called him out on how nastily he often acted towards them. Maybe Turbo got snappish with them often, maybe he could be self-centered, but he still cared about them. They were his challengers, his co-ops, his NPCs…they were his friends.

He had complained about Turbo Time, too, about its deserted environment and awful graphics and boring racetrack and everything else, but at the end of the day, the game was his home. "Without me, Turbo Time would be nothing," he had used to brag. But the reverse was also true. He was nothing without it, just a game character without a home, without a purpose, and without anything to live for.

He bent his head forward as a thick pain choked his throat. No, no, he wasn't going to cry…crying was for weaklings, for losers, for kids…

At that point, the little girl hesitantly crept towards him. Her eyebrows crinkled with concern as she placed her tiny hands on the edge of his bed.

Turbo hardly noticed. He was sniffling now, involuntarily, and all of his efforts were going into not letting a sob escape from his mouth.

The little girl stood up on her tiptoes and placed her healthy peach-toned hand atop his dead white one. Her fingers twitched briefly, as if the touch had sent a tangible shock through her, but she continued to gaze up at him with her enormous hazel eyes. A face like that was enough to break anyone's reserve.

Turbo stifled a sob, and as he did, it happened – he glitched.

It took him off-guard, and there was almost no warning for it. His body started tingling again, as if static was building up inside him, and then he briefly unraveled into glowing red pixels. The transition was extremely fast, and in a little more than a second he had snapped back together, but it was plenty enough to be noticeable. The little girl drew away from him in shock. He gasped, turning to look down at himself so quickly that he forgot about hiding his teary yellow eyes. "Wh-what was that?!"

"A…a glitch," answered the little girl, stunned.

Felix spoke up, "Maybe when Vanellope touched you, she accidentally…no, she didn't, I was watching her." He frowned.

Turbo's breath caught. He told himself that all characters glitched every once in a while, it was just a part of technology, it was nothing to be afraid of…but his heart rate was going up, and even as he sat there inwardly reassuring himself, another burst of red pixels rippled through him.

He wrapped his arms around himself with a short cry, as if trying to hold his body together. "I-I can't be glitching!" he exclaimed fearfully. "I'm a lead – " The reality of his situation returned to him, and he released a shaky breath. "I mean, I  _was_  a lead character…so I guess it doesn't matter anymore." He deflated.

At that, the little girl tilted up her chin. "I'm a lead character, too," she proclaimed, "and I glitch." To emphasize her point, she made herself vanish in a blast of blue electric energy, only to reappear a few yards away.

Turbo wiped his eyes, startled. "…What k-kind of game is this, anyway?"

"It's a racing game," she replied. "That's why you're here. Now that we've, uh, fixed you, you can be a racer again. Nowadays, we don't like people who get unplugged to just sit around in Game Central Station and mope. You've gotta work."

He must have been vulnerable enough that his doubt came through on his face.

"What's wrong?" The little girl pursed her lips. "Don't you like racing?"

"I love racing." He more than loved racing; it was as much a part of him as his helmet or his jumpsuit, the very thing that he had been created to do. "But I can't race if I'm – " Another glitch fizzed through his slight frame. "D-doing that!"

"Oh, that," she responded dismissively. "It's easy to control a glitch…after a while."

"Maybe Vanellope can show you," suggested Felix hopefully. "After all, she's had a lot of practice controlling her glitch!"

"I guess so…" Turbo shivered. His head seemed to have gained a considerable amount of weight out of nowhere, and he felt himself falling back against the pillow again.

This didn't escape the girl's attention, and she said, "You should sleep to regain your strength. Tomorrow we can work on your glitch training."

"If you say so." He blinked wearily. "And it's okay if I stay here?"

"Uh-huh."

The armored woman, who had been particularly quiet during the entire conversation, cleared her throat. "Come on, Vanellope," she beckoned, but the little girl hung back, as if she couldn’t keep herself from gawking at the ghost boy.

“Vanellope,” echoed Turbo. “You said that was your name, but…did you say who you are?”

“No, I didn’t.” She cleared her throat. "I'm President Vanellope von Schweetz, the leader of Sugar Rush."

"And…you said you already know who I am." He glitched, which dragged him out of an almost dozing stupor. "Aah – ! That feels so weird!"

"Yeah, I know…I've been doing that all my life. You'll get used to it." Vanellope's expression darkened slightly, or perhaps that was only Turbo's eyes playing a trick on him, because the room was beginning to dim as he succumbed to his physical and emotional exhaustion.

He was vaguely aware of Fix-It Felix examining the door that his wife had broken down with some embarrassment, muttering, "It's okay, I can fix it." The armored woman shouldered her gun and strode out with a last venomous glare in Turbo's reaction, while little Vanellope ran up to greet a much larger man out in the corridor who Turbo could barely see from his bed.

Nebulous, half-formed thoughts chased themselves in cul-de-sacs around his head. He was so preoccupied with thinking about Jet and Set, and Turbo Time, and Vanellope, and the people who had called him a ghost boy, and thirty years lost, that he didn't even notice when his eyes fell shut and the only images he was seeing existed in his mind's eye alone. So many things crowded around and ganged up on each other within his brain, and soon enough, he was thinking about nothing at all.


	4. Weirdos

_Turbo was consumed by an incomparable agony, by a force that gnashed at his existence and warped the very components of his being. This wasn't like a mere stomachache or headache, in which the pain was concentrated within his physical self; something had wormed its way into his coding. He thrashed and struggled in the grip of the malfunction, pushing himself towards a pinpoint of light that he somehow knew would rescue him. At the very least, it was sure to transport him somewhere else, and anything was better than being here._

_His efforts were made increasingly difficult by the fact that he was heading into an impossibly strong wind, some kind of push-pull force that made the sleeves of his jumpsuit snap erratically about his wrists and constantly tried to send him spinning off in the opposite direction. He was unable to tell if he was being sucked in by something at the center of this distorted world or shoved back by something at the edge of it, but he pressed on nonetheless. All he wanted was a release from this pain, and whether he died here or somehow made it to the exit, he would put an end to his suffering one way or another._

_Since it was a dream, he abruptly transitioned into a new setting without bothering to wonder how he'd gotten there or even noticing that something was amiss at all: now he was in Game Central Station, only it was vacant, and the ceilings were too high, and the glaringly bright lights bleached out most of the color from the world around him. He fell into an automatic stride and started walking in the direction of home, but when he reached the portal, he stopped up short. The scrolling sign above the tunnel should have been spelling out "TO TURBO TIME," as it had for the past six years. But there was nothing to label the entrance to his game. No sign at all, much less one that announced the area as Turbo Time._

" _Jet? Set?" he called, and despite the vastness of this dream version of Game Central Station, there was no echo to his voice at all. He received no reply._

_Even if it was the middle of the day, Game Central Station was never empty. A few odd NPCs and homeless characters could always be found milling about here and there, and Surge Protector constantly patrolled the area, eyes peeled for signs of suspicious activity. But now Turbo was alone. There was no one around to praise him, to comfort him, or even to mock him by calling him a ghost boy._

_Cautiously, he stepped into the dark entryway that had at one time deposited him to his home…_

… _only to realize that it was now an endless black hole, and he fell so rapidly that the air currents snatched away his scream –_

* * *

 

When Turbo came to his senses, he was sitting up in his strange new bed, clutching at his head, while various areas of his body exploded into scarlet pixels. He panted and lowered his arms, and as the fog in his mind was burned off, his glitching ceased. That was one downside of being such a light sleeper: any time he had a particularly vivid dream or a nightmare, there was a high probability that he would start talking or acting out the nonsensical events before his brain had fully woken up. He was just grateful that he'd managed to avoid actually getting out of bed this time. And if he'd screamed, at least nobody had come running.

He quizzed himself on the information that he had received yesterday. Turbo Time had been unplugged (that explained the nature of his dream) and apparently he'd almost died when it had; he had been reformatted by Fix-It Felix Jr. and taken to a game he'd never heard of called Sugar Rush; thirty years had passed; and everything and everyone that he'd ever known most likely no longer existed. Seemed like a fair summary to him.

He crackled into static again, causing him to flinch.

Oh, yes, and he was glitchy now, too. That must have been the cherry on top of the proverbial bad luck sundae.

Turbo swung his legs over the side of the sponge cake bed. If he was going to be living in this sugary game, then he figured that he was at least entitled to have a look around.

He eased open the thick gingerbread door and got his first view of the corridor beyond. Even from a few glimpses, he could gather that this building was huge, ornate, frilly, and constructed entirely out of sugary foodstuffs. He spotted candy cane pillars, gumdrop doorstops, fondant wallpaper, and who knew what else. He'd always been a big fan of chocolate milkshakes with whipped cream, but even the sight of all this junk food was giving him a stomachache.

He placed a hand over his abdomen, frowning. Actually, it was making him hungry. Could it really be possible that he hadn't eaten in thirty years?

Resolved to discover the whereabouts of the kitchen, he set off down the hall, passing rows upon rows of near-identical gingerbread doors. He was going to have a hard time finding his way back to his room later, that much was for sure. Hopefully he'd be able to meet up with Fix-It Felix or someone else who would be willing to help him.

Eventually, the hall slanted down into a curving staircase, then opened up into a room that was extremely, severely pink. Every object that had the capacity to be decorated was as lacy as a doily. A strip of carpet formed a path from the doors to a little alcove, where a piece of furniture that looked like a combination of a throne and a crown-shaped racecar had been placed. Windows and balconies were placed intermittently along the two longest walls, saturating the whole place with a pleasant, rosy light.

"What  _is_  this place?" he wondered aloud. His confused query was amplified, bouncing back and forth across the domed ceiling.

As if in response, a round, green creature no taller than Turbo’s waist entered the room by way of a second staircase. It had the appearance of a sentient piece of candy – a jawbreaker, maybe, or a gumball. It wielded a broom twice its size, which it robotically swept over the floor as it moved forward. All in all, it couldn't have looked more apathetic as it went about its work, and both its face and its movements appeared to lack any shred of motivation.

"Hey, you!" called Turbo. "Um, 'scuse me! Green gumball guy!"

The green creature tilted its face towards him drearily. In an instant, its dull eyes widened in shock, and it took off running. Before Turbo even had a chance to react, it had bolted off the way it had come, dragging its oversized broom behind it.

Turbo glitched.

"Uh…okay then, don't help me," he muttered under his breath. "Weirdo." Unconsciously, he rested a hand against his cheek. He had grown accustomed to having people stare at him when they saw his face for the first time, but no one had ever overreacted like the characters in this game. Had those thirty blanked-out years given him an even more grotesque appearance, or something?

There wasn't another person in sight, which caused Turbo to realize how vacant this whole giant building was. Besides the little green gumball thing, he hadn't seen hide nor hair of anyone, not even any NPCs.

Maybe everyone was outside instead…he padded over to the nearest balcony window to take a look. Just as he was about to step into the sunlight and get his first glimpse of this game's world, someone lifted him up by the collar of his jumpsuit.

Turbo yelped, thrashing in his captor's grip. "Hey, what's the big idea?!" he demanded.

As he slowly rotated around, his collar held in the grip of two enormous fingers, he found himself staring into the scowling face of an extremely large man with unruly hair and bare feet, who was dressed in a pair of threadbare overalls. "You!" growled the man. "I've been looking all over the place for you!"

"Take it easy, it's not like I went very far!" protested Turbo. "I didn't know that I wasn't supposed to leave! Put me down!"

He glitched again, at exactly the wrong moment. He dissolved into red static long enough to escape the grip of the large man and went crashing to the floor, knocking both of his knees in the process.

" _Oww_ ," hissed Turbo as he dragged himself back to his feet. He was having a hard enough time being a glitch without it causing him physical injury, as well.

The large man blinked in surprise, before his frown became even more pronounced. "Did you just do that on purpose?!"

"Oh, please," Turbo shot back. "If I had any say in the matter, I wouldn't be doing it at all!" He rubbed his sore knees indignantly. "Wait a minute, I think I recognize you. Aren't you the bad guy from the Fix-It Felix Jr. Game? Break-It Ralph, or something like that?"

"Wreck-It Ralph," the man corrected, placing his hands on his hips. "And you're not supposed to be wandering off,  _Turbo_." He spoke the name as if it was an insult of the worst kind.

Turbo rolled his eyes. "Then someone should have told me that before! I just went out looking to see if I could find anybody. There's hardly anyone in this whole place!"

"That's because they’re all down at the Royal Raceway,” said Ralph scornfully, like Turbo should have known something so obvious. “For the daily Random Roster Race.”

Oh, yeah. This was supposed to be a racing game. The only problem was, Turbo hadn't seen anything that even remotely resembled a race track, or a trophy, or even a car, which were the objects that he tended to associate with racing. "Where are you supposed to drive around here? Do they race through this building or something?"

Ralph shook his head and jabbed a finger towards the balcony window. "The tracks are outside."

" _Tracks_? As in, plural?" Turbo scampered to the edge of the balcony, curiosity piqued. The sight that awaited him was like nothing he had ever imagined.

It wasn't the creative usage of various candies that got to him, nor was it the glitter-graphics that packed in more detail than any game of his own era. No, the sheer  _size_  of everything was what boggled his mind the most. The building in which he was standing was but a mere background feature of a vast sugary land, part of a landscape that included mountains and valleys and villages and labyrinths and who-knew-what-else just over the horizon. And there were indeed multiple racetracks. He spotted roads all over the place, doubling in on themselves in complex crisscrosses and squiggles, so unlike the plain oval course of Turbo Time or the endless long street of RoadBlasters.

"What the what?" he gasped. "How could any game even have enough memory to hold all of this?!"

Behind him, Ralph shrugged his massive shoulders, not nearly so impressed. "Technology has improved a lot since 1987."

Turbo was still so enamored with the view that he hardly heard the response. Now he was able to pick out the racers, who were visible as little more than zooming dots shredding up the courses and leaving trails of dust behind them. They dodged obstacles and soared over gaps and did flips in the air – all of it looked infinitely more exciting that puttering around the same old circular path day after day. He grinned as he imagined himself getting down there to join in on the fun. "Can I go to the tracks and watch the racers today?"

"What?! Uh, no, absolutely not!" Ralph crossed his massive arms sternly.

Turbo turned around, his face pulling into a frustrated glower. "Why not?"

"It's not a good idea for you to go down there. You're just gonna have to listen to me on this one." Ralph wasn't showing one drop of sympathy towards the would-be racer. "I'm in charge of you right now, and I was told that you're not supposed to leave the castle, so – "

"You're babysitting me?!" interrupted Turbo. "Come on, that is so unfair! What do you think I'm gonna do that's so bad I need a babysitter?! Don't you have your own job or something?!"

"Well, obviously,” answered Ralph evenly, his tense posture betraying the anger that he was holding back. "But it’s the end of the day. Felix and Calhoun went to go watch Vanellope race, and normally I’d go, too, but I didn’t feel comfortable knowing that the only one here to keep an eye on you was Sour Bill.”

Turbo stopped up short and winced as another glitch rippled through him. "Oh, great. I slept the whole day away.”

“They finished up with you pretty close to morning in the first place,” retorted Ralph curtly, before placing his hands on his hips. He eyeballed Turbo for so long that it seemed he was interpreting the task of “keeping an eye on him” quite literally.

Turbo’s nerves prickled with annoyance. “Well, okay, as you can see, I’m perfectly fine! So you can just…go home, or whatever!” He flapped his hands in a shooing motion.

Ralph barely moved, as solid as the brick building that he was routinely tasked with destroying. “This is my home.”

“Yeah, right. I know this isn’t your game!”

“It’s not my _game_ , it’s my _home_ ,” he corrected. “One of my homes. Sometimes we all stay here with Vanellope, sometimes we move to my place, or to Felix’s. Right now it looks like we’re gonna be here for a while because _you’re_ here.”

“Lucky me,” muttered Turbo. He turned on his heels and strode back inside, grateful that he was slim enough to brush by Ralph without too much trouble.

Ralph watched him go with challengingly arched eyebrows. "You know, your voice sounds different," he remarked.

Turbo pressed his lips together. "Different, like how? What do you mean? I haven't noticed any difference myself."

The wrecker's breath hitched. "Oh. Uh, just forget I said anything."

Turbo frowned, once again overcome by the sneaking suspicion that something was being withheld from him. "All of you people here are weirdos."

* * *

 

Ralph escorted Turbo to the kitchen for breakfast/dinner/whatever, where the estranged racer fixed himself some graham crackers smothered with cream cheese icing. The meal was more sugar-laden than he was accustomed to, but tasty nonetheless. He had finished eating and was licking the white frosting from his equally white fingers when Ralph spoke again:

"So, Turbo, remind me of something here. What's your intended age?"

Turbo's tongue darted briefly around his mouth. "Intended age?" he repeated.

"You know, the age that your programmers designed you as. How old are you supposed to be?"

He hesitated, reluctant to answer the question. He was already irritated because he'd been assigned a babysitter; the last thing he needed was for this wrecking guy to know that he actually was a teenager. Then again, Ralph probably already suspected or knew that, and was only asking as a formality. "I dunno, maybe around fourteen or fifteen?"

Ralph's eyes widened. "… _fifteen_?!"

"Uh, yeah. That's my best guess." Turbo glitched once again, but did his best to ignore it. "What, did you think I was older?"

Ralph shook his head in bewilderment. "I don't exactly know what I thought…but I mean, fifteen?! You're just a kid!"

Turbo's eyes narrowed, and another indignant glitch zipped down his frame. "I'm not a kid!"

But Ralph paid no mind to the statement of protest, as he was still wrapped up in what appeared to be a mixture of surprise and frustration. "After all of this…fif-freaking-teen years old..." he muttered under his breath.

"What are you talking about?" demanded Turbo.

"Nothing, nothing!" Ralph exhaled harshly. "Why don't you just go back to your room for now? Somebody will come in and get you later."

"What, you're putting me in a time-out now?" snapped Turbo. "I didn't do anything except tell you my age, because you asked me for it! This whole morning you've been treating me like I did something wrong! Well, newsflash – it's not my fault that my game got unplugged and almost killed me! I didn't  _choose_  to come here!"

Ralph just stared, his face masked by an unreadable expression. "Just go to your room, Turbo."

Turbo glitched furiously and stomped off. Just as he exited the kitchen, he could have sworn that he heard Ralph mumble, "You have no idea what you just said, you dumb kid."

* * *

 

Oddly enough, Turbo overheard a similar snippet of a conversation about thirty minutes, once again involving Ralph. As he knocked about in his room with nothing in particular to do, waiting for something to happen, his ears pricked at the sound of voices just outside his door. Then he realized that they were talking about him…

He tiptoed over and pressed the side of his head against the door, bound and determined to remain undetected.

"…gotten ourselves in way over our heads, Felix!" lamented Ralph. "I knew from the start that this was a bad idea!"

"I know it seems a little overwhelming now," answered Fix-It Felix's voice soothingly, "but it was the right thing to do, and that's the important thing."

"Still. If he was an adult, it would be hard enough, but he's  _fifteen_! Who wants to deal with a stubborn teenager?!"

"Honestly, Ralph, I don't know why his age surprises you so much. I had a passing acquaintanceship with him thirty years ago, and even if I never knew exactly how old he was, it was easy to see that he was young. And consider what he did…it definitely seems like something a child would do, don't you think?"

"I guess so. But I don't know if it makes me feel better or worse that all of this trouble was caused by a spoiled snot-nosed little kid being…a spoiled snot-nosed little kid!"

"Keep your voice down!" hissed Felix.

Turbo was scowling now, feeling slight glitches bubbling beneath his skin. It had been thirty years since he'd last interacted with anyone outside of his own game, and while a lot had changed in that time, apparently people were still against him for no reason whatsoever. Not much had changed. Why had his developers thought it was a good idea to make him so young?! Didn't they realize how difficult they would be making his life?! Now no matter what he did, no matter what era he was in, nobody was going to see him as anything more than a  _kid_.

Beside his ear, the doorknob clicked.

He gasped and scrambled back as the door opened a sliver, and he folded his arms behind his back, trying to look as nonchalant as possible so that Felix or Ralph wouldn't suspect that he'd been eavesdropping. But it wasn't either of them. Instead, the little black-ponytailed girl from yesterday stuck her head into the room.

"Oh, it's you," said Turbo. "Penelope, right?"

" _Vanellope_ ," she corrected, thrusting out her lips in an irritated pout. "Let's go, Turbo. You and I are going out for some lessons."

She plunged a hand into her pocket and tossed a limp, black object at him. Turbo reached up and caught the item easily: it was a pair of goggles, like the kind worn by pilots to prevent the wind from throwing dust into their eyes. He realized that in this game, since the ground was actually textured with dirt, goggles were probably useful when you were on the road driving an open-roofed kart all day. The straps felt uncomfortably foreign in his hand.

"Driving lessons?" he said, and sniffed dismissively. "I don't need driving lessons. I already know how to race."

Vanellope shook her head, her back already turned towards him as she strode into the hall. "No, not driving lessons. Glitch lessons."


	5. Glitch lessons

"So, Turbo, are you really only fifteen years old?"

Turbo had been spending the past five minutes staring at the back of Vanellope's head as she escorted him through the cavernous building that he apparently lived in now, and he was beginning to wonder if she had some problem with making eye contact with him. Also, if even a little girl was about to start patronizing him for his age, then he was going to blow a fuse. "Yeah, I am," he replied. "Why is that so weird? It's like everybody here can't believe it."

"I guess," she answered, seemingly choosing her words carefully, "we just didn't expect that the lead character of a racing game would be so young."

"You said you're the lead character of a racing game and you're, what, five?"

"I'm  _nine_!" she declared angrily, spinning on her heels to face him for the first time since they had left his bedroom.

He shrugged dismissively. "Same difference. You're a little kid and you're the leader of a racing game, is what I'm saying. If it's so perfectly normal for you to be nine, then why is everyone acting like it's strange that I'm fifteen?"

"Well, it makes sense for me to be a kid," she huffed. "That's the whole point of the candy theme. All us racers are supposed to look like cute little kids dressed like pieces of candy. But you…" She trailed off tellingly.

"…yeah, I'm a creeper. I get it," grumbled Turbo. This sort of thing was exactly what infuriated him; thirty years later, and through no fault of his own, he was even more of a ghost boy in a world overrun by complex human characters. "This might come as a surprise to you, but back when my game was developed, game designers didn't have glitter-graphics like you've got here. I can't help it if this was the best they could do on me."

Vanellope squinted, pushing herself up to her black-booted tiptoes. "You do look young, though. I can see it in your face," she remarked. "I wonder why I never noticed that before?"

"Uh, maybe because you've only seen me one other time before now?" He fizzled into red pixels just as he spoke the last word, and he flinched involuntarily, his muscles tightening.

"Jeez, you are glitchy, aren'cha?" She twirled around again and marched on, bringing him into the atrium that he had paid a brief visit to that morning. "Here's your first lesson of the day. Don't freak out or tense up when you glitch, 'cause that'll just make you glitch more."

"That's hard, though." Turbo rubbed his shoulders, trying to alleviate his tenseness. "I hate the way it feels."

"It's not hurting you, is it?"

"No…but it feels really weird! Like I'm about to break into a million pieces."

"You  _are_  breaking into a million pieces, g- _doy_. You just go back together after a second." By now they’d reached the throne room, and she skipped over to a stained-glass door set into the opposite wall and went to work tugging it open. As he had suspected, it was one of the main exits, and he soon found himself confronted by the candy world he had glimpsed before now spread out like a childish fantasy in front of him.

"Gee, that makes me feel better," he mumbled, now finding that a mental image of himself exploding into pieces had become entrapped in his head.

There was a path leading from the door to a much wider road, which was a mere few paces away, and as he continued to follow her he got his first decent look at the building that he'd spent the day in. It wasn't a house, or a mansion, or even a hotel: it was a castle, immense and gleaming with a frosting-like resin in the glow of the lemon drop sun. Turbo realized (admittedly late) that if Vanellope really was the lead character of this game, then the castle was most likely her home, which meant that he had been staying here as her personal guest. And she was also probably the reason why he'd been rescued from Turbo Time in the first place…

Something in his conscience was prompting him to thank her, but she had been nothing but a know-it-all brat to him thus far, so he wasn't about to display any gratitude just yet. So instead he asked, "What's a  _president_  doing living in a castle?"

"I used to be a princess, but I changed it," she called back, having already reached the road. There was a go-kart awaiting her there, sloppily decorated with a random assortment of icing globs and sprinkles and glitter, and she patted its side possessively as she clambered in.

Turbo couldn't help but snort at the poor construction of the vehicle, already beginning to miss his sleek, elegant red racer from Turbo Time. "And what's a princess or a president doing driving that hunk of junk?"

She flared. "How dare you insult my kart?! It's special!" She plopped down in the driver's seat, glowering at him, as if she thought a face as cherubic as hers had any potential to be menacing. "There's a royal go-kart that was programmed into the game, but I never use it. I like this one better. Now, hop on, or else I'm gonna drive off without you and not feel bad about it at all."

His little snub nose crinkled distastefully. "There's only room for one person."

"You can sit on the back. Come on, I've done this loads of times before! I won't go fast enough to knock you off…" Her hazel eyes darkened a shade. "That is, unless you insult my car again. Then I'll have to throw you to the side of the road."

Scowling, he begrudgingly secured himself as best he could on the back of the kart, not thrilled about having to hitch a ride on something that looked as if it had been cobbled together from bakery scraps. But he relaxed somewhat as Vanellope shifted into gear and began driving down the road. The vehicle must have been equipped with a good engine, because it ran much more smoothly than he'd anticipated, and its driver was admirably skillful and controlled for someone her age. He was able to lean back somewhat and enjoy the scenery; all in all, it would have been a perfectly pleasant ride had he not been forced to grip his perch so tightly that his knuckles somehow got even whiter.

After a trip of about ten minutes in length, Vanellope pulled onto a side road that in turn brought them to what was unmistakably a racetrack. It looped back in on itself in a familiar way, and Turbo spotted a checkered strip on the ground, located directly below a banner that spelled out START on one side and FINISH on the other. He perked up, beginning to feel more in his element.

"This is Sweet Ride," explained Vanellope. "The simplest course in the game. It's good for beginners." She eased to a stop just past the start/finish line, where two things were awaiting them, one more welcome than the other: the first was a generic-looking go-kart, constructed of different sweets just like every other item in this game, and the second was Wreck-It Ralph, who stood by the kart with his arms crossed and a suspicious frown plastered over his face.

Turbo groaned. "Oh, great. What are  _you_  doing here?"

"I'm supervising you two," replied Ralph stiffly. "You didn't think that we were going to trust you to be alone with Vanellope just yet, did you?"

"Apparently you can't even trust me to be alone in an empty building right now." Turbo glitched, then grimaced as the distortions in his code rippled the kart beneath him. "But I still don't know exactly  _why_  you're all treating me this way."

"Oh, you'll be able to go out on your own soon enough," interjected Vanellope. "Once you're a real racer. But before that can happen, you have to learn how to control your glitch." She directed her pudgy little finger towards the other car. "That's one of the game's generic default karts, but you can use it for now. It'll be good while you get used to driving again. Go ahead, get in."

Turbo slipped from his seat and padded over to his new vehicle, examining it with an experienced racer's knowledgeable eye. It didn't appear to be nearly as aerodynamic as his previous car, and he still couldn't figure out how something made of cookies and shortbread could run in the first place, but the controls were straightforward enough. Brake, gas, clutch, gear shift. Push-button start and a normal-looking steering wheel. Seemed fairly easy.

He lifted himself into the driver's chair and adjusted the interior as best he could. The car's entire layout and size had been designed for someone Vanellope's size, and while he wasn't too much taller than her, his proportions were much different. Finally, he felt as if he'd be able to put his foot on the pedals without stretching his leg to its maximum length.

Vanellope had come over now, and she was peering in at him. "First, press the button to start it up," she instructed.

He scoffed. "Look, glitter-graphics, I know how to drive. Okay? I've been racing since before your code was even a gleam in the eye of your developers!"

She blinked, and then exchanged a glance with Ralph. "Okay. If you say so. But you might want to actually use those goggles I gave you, unless you want the road debris to gouge out your eyes."

Turbo was fairly sure that racetrack grit wasn't enough to cause permanent ocular damage like that, but he fished the goggles out of his jumpsuit pocket, deciding not to take the risk. The black band slipped easily over his helmet, as if it had already been adjusted for him beforehand. As he secured the lenses over his eyes, he couldn't help but think about how odd it was to have a layer of clear plastic separating him from the road. Back in Turbo Time, he had never worn any protective gear other than his pre-programmed helmet and jumpsuit.

His hand hovered uncertainly over the controls for a moment; then he jabbed the start button, and the engine rumbled into alertness beneath him. So far, so good. He twisted the joystick into first gear and then nudged the gas pedal with his toe, easing himself forward. He was gripping the steering wheel with unusual rigidity, and he realized that he was nervous about this.

Vanellope watched all of this with her hands on her hips, eyes half-closed in smug indifference, and Ralph didn't look too impressed either.

Feeling miffed by the way they looked at him as if he were an amateur, Turbo shifted into second gear and increased pressure on the accelerator. The track curved up ahead, and he breezed around the turn effortlessly. He would prove to them that he didn't need a warm-up, because after all, he was the greatest racer ever – this was what he had been made to do, and even if he hadn't practiced in thirty years, he was still the best of the best. He urged the kart faster, eager to once again feel the adrenaline pounding in his veins as he amped up the speed…

"HEY, GENIUS!" yelled Vanellope from behind him. "I WOULDN'T DO THAT IF I WERE YOU!"

Turbo gritted his teeth, determined to ignore her. As he'd said before, Vanellope was significantly younger than him, both in intended age and in actual age. He wasn't going to let her boss him around because she thought she knew more about this than he did…

And, of course, that was when his body began to crackle with static again. He stiffened in his seat, willing the disturbance to go away, but it was too late: he was already fizzing into pixels, and this time, it was severe enough to make the kart glitch along with him. He cried out in a mixture of panic and dismay, promptly losing control of the vehicle. When he veered off of the road not five seconds later, the front of the car smacked into a nearby jawbreaker without enough momentum to break anything, but just hard enough to give him a nasty bout of whiplash.

He sat there, dazed, wondering how in the world he could have made such a stupid mistake. Sure, he could get thrown for a loop whenever an obstacle was tossed at him, but he had never just spun out randomly like that in Turbo Time! A chill settled in the pit of his stomach as he realized that right now, his own body was the challenge that he had to get past…and he couldn't control it.

The sound of an engine revving startled him.

Vanellope, now with a pair of hot pink goggles strapped around her head, had returned to her car and was now zooming around the track. He had considered her to be good for her age on the trip here, but now that he really had a chance to see her in action, he was starting to understand that age had nothing to do with it. She was undoubtedly an excellent racer, nine years old or not. She followed the course so precisely that her kart might have been running on rails, nonchalantly adjusting to every little dip or bump that she encountered, only gaining speed when she came to anything resembling a dangerous obstacle. And she glitched, too – only instead of it hindering her as it had Turbo, she was doing it intentionally, using it to jet forward and teleport herself further along the track. She didn't give one involuntary glitch the entire time.

And when she had finally finished, she slowed to a halt where he had crashed, and she pursed her lips at him as he lifted his goggles to gape at her.

"When you can do that, you can go as fast as you want to," she declared. "But until then, you're gonna listen to me. Understand?"

Turbo scowled, muttered a halfhearted confirmation under his breath, and put his car into reverse.

* * *

 

He never did get to race that day.

He didn't even spend much time in the generic borrowed car. Vanellope seemed to agree that the issue for him lay not in his driving but in his glitching, and so she attempted to pass on her infinite glitch-control wisdom to him in the hopes that he could quickly overcome the problem. It didn't work out so well. "It's all in your head!" she proclaimed about a hundred times during the lesson. "Just concentrate, tell yourself that you're in control, and you will be!" Meanwhile, Ralph sat down on a large gumdrop and watched them silently, suspicious eyes half-hidden behind his bushy auburn eyebrows.

Turbo legitimately tried to take Vanellope's advice into account, but it was no use; his glitch was still too new and raw and erratic. It seemed to fluctuate in conjunction with his emotions. Every time a splash of crimson pixels rippled through him, he would experience a fleeting moment of panic, usually followed by hot frustration pressing at his eyes and throat, and this created a vicious cycle leading to more intense and more frequent glitches. Trying to focus on them didn't help. If anything, it just made him even more angry when his efforts inevitably failed. And the worst part was that, as the little munchkin was constantly reminding him, he couldn't properly race until he could control his glitch.

After an hour of futile training, he absolutely couldn't take it anymore. Even looking at the kart he couldn’t drive was torturous to him. All he wanted was to move, to go fast, to be a racer again, but he was being held back by a freak malfunction in his coding. It was infinitely worse than being a ghost boy. At least other people teasing hadn't kept him from doing the thing that he was meant to do.

Finally, Vanellope told him that he'd gotten himself too worked up and she couldn't possibly teach him any more today. She gave him a ride back to the castle while Ralph transported the other car – since he was too big to fit inside of it, he lifted it up in his massive hands as if it weighed no more than a plate of cookies and carried it back, lagging some distance behind them. Turbo didn't say a word during the entire journey. He was too busy quietly trembling and glitching, unsure whether to be furious or depressed about the day's events…he was miserable either way.

"Come on, don't be too disappointed," Vanellope trilled at him as she pulled into an underground garage beneath the castle. "It took me a while to learn how to get a handle on my glitch! I bet you'll start getting the hang of it soon, Pajama Boy." She giggled.

His eyes, which had been bitterly squinting, widened until they were so round and yellow that they looked like headlights. " _What_  did you just call me?!" he demanded.

"Pajama Boy!" she repeated gleefully, indicating his jumpsuit with a dip of her head. "'Cause, y'know, that looks awfully comfy-cozy to be a racing uniform!"

" _Haven't you insulted me enough already?!_ " he snarled, enraged glitches exploding all across his body, and for a moment, he almost didn't recognize his own voice.

Some of the blush in her rosy cheeks drained away, and something he hadn’t expected to see from her – something like true terror –made a brief, flickering appearance. "I-it was just a joke…"

He shook his head briskly in the hopes of clearing it, wondering if perhaps the static pixels were interfering with his brain, as well as his body. "Well, I'm not in the mood!" he cried, and he stormed back to his room in a huff, fuming, his fists tight bludgeons at his sides.

Surprisingly, it wasn't all that difficult finding his way back to his bedroom, but it seemed that one last obstacle had been placed to avert him. Fix-It Felix Jr. and the crazy soldier lady who was apparently his wife were standing around in hallway, and Turbo had the uncomfortable sense that they'd been waiting for him and Vanellope to return. The soldier lady only drilled through him with a menacing glare – much like Ralph, she acted as if she had some sort of a grudge against him – but Felix smiled brightly and approached the estranged racer with a hopeful gleam in his eyes. "Oh, you're back! How did it go?"

"Awfully," mumbled Turbo, trying to edge around the duo and into the hall.

He'd hoped that the Fix-It would leave it at that, but of course, it wasn't so simple. "Really? What happened?" asked Felix, and he sounded so truly concerned as he spoke the question that Turbo snapped. He spun on his heels and was shouting before he could stop himself.

"What happened is that I'm useless now! What happened is that  _I can't even drive!_ " he shouted, the pent-up words spewing out of his mouth as uncontrollably as his glitches. He scowled at the sound of his voice shaking, and managed to throttle back to a tone of cold anger. “I hate being a glitch and I hate being here and I want to go _home_. And I wish you’d just left me wherever I was instead of trying to fix me.”

Felix slowly lifted a gloved hand over his heart, his mouth creasing sympathetically. "Turbo…"

Turbo flickered erratically into red electricity, and then he took off into his room, his shoes squeaking on the marbled hard candy floor. He slammed the door and threw himself down on his sponge cake bed dejectedly, his face landing downwards in the despicably soft marshmallow pillow. Its texture had suddenly become intolerable to him, so he flung it on the ground, then rolled over to glare at the ceiling like it was personally responsible for his current misery.

It wasn’t right to yell at Felix, but Turbo found it hard to feel sorry. Felix had always been trying to _fix_ the teen racer during the five years that they’d lived in the arcade together, or at least that was how it felt, which was why Turbo had taken to avoiding him. He didn’t like to think of himself as broken, although he was, wasn’t he? Too obtuse to realize when he was being insulted right to his face. Too weird to make friends, or even to realize what exactly was so weird about him. And of course, too creepy-looking to pass for human.

 _No wonder the gamers got sick of me_.

He draped an arm over his eyes tiredly. In the end, he wasn’t bothered by Felix attempting to fix him, or at least, that was the least bothersome part of things. What really got him was that he’d somehow survived the unplugging of his game, made it all the way here, and not only could he not remember it – he’d also somehow come out even more broken on the other side.


	6. Looking for attention

"Get into a peaceful state of mind. Like zen or something."

"I'm trying."

Glitch glitch.

"Not good enough! You just did it again!"

"I'm doing the best I can here!"

"Then do better!"

A repressed growl built up in the back of Turbo's throat, but he held it there, instead contenting himself with simply glowering at Vanellope. It was his third day of glitch training, and so far, the only thing he had achieved was succeeding in not breaking down again or showing his mounting frustration in a form other than anger. It wasn't just the glitching that grated on his nerves, but also everything else about his new lifestyle: the isolation of being forced to spend every day under strict supervision in the castle, the constant suspicious glares that Ralph and Sergeant Calhoun (AKA the crazy soldier lady) were subjecting him to, and the disorienting transition of trying to come to terms with the loss of his game and his coworkers. But in its own devious way, being a glitch was the worst part of it all.

Previously, whenever Turbo had gotten upset or overly emotional, he'd raced. He had taken his car out to the expanse of the Turbo Time track, slammed his foot on the gas pedal, and gone around and around in circles until adrenaline had washed his inhibitions away and confidence began to return to him. Sometimes Jet or Set would compete with him during this ritual, but it was just as effective when he was alone, as well. Now he was trying to deal with a set of infuriating, depressing, and frankly confusing life changes, and he had no coping mechanism. His glitch was now denying him both purpose and release.

At the moment, he and Vanellope were at Sweet Ride again, where they'd returned each day for lessons. Turbo didn't see much point in doing glitch training at a racetrack, since he hadn't properly raced once since his reformatting. Regardless, Ralph still carried the generic kart to this course every day; the wrecker was currently sitting on a jawbreaker some distance away from them, observing without much interest.

"Try again, Pajama Boy!" chided Vanellope in her tippy singsong inflections, using her favorite derogatory alias for him. She was spinning around in her black boots, occasionally glitch-teleporting to various points in his field of vision just to be irritating.

"I'll try again when I'm good and ready, glitter-graphics," snapped Turbo.

She snickered. "If you're gonna insult me, you should at least choose a less pretty name! Now come on, close your eyes. Clear your mind and focus…"

Turbo squeezed his eyes shut and tried to picture what transcending to a higher state of being might look like, because he honestly had no idea. He had spent his entire life around arcade games that were neither particularly violent nor especially peaceful. No one made consoles based around meditation or Chinese rock gardens, so how would he even know what it felt like when he was relaxed enough to be in control of his glitch? That is, if he  _ever_  became relaxed enough to gain any control.

As he stood there, making a concentrated effort to focus on not glitching, he knew that Vanellope would be creeping around him now. His eyes were still closed so that he couldn't see her, and she moved quietly enough that her footsteps were inaudible, which was all a part of this "training exercise." While his mind was supposedly cleared, she would jump out and try to spook him. If his brain preparations had worked, then he would be able to avoid bursting into pixels when he was startled. Simple.

He hadn't managed to accomplish this easy goal yet, although he'd been working practically nonstop at it for the past two days. Their collective theory that he glitched more when he got emotional was proving to be absolutely correct.

Just as he was pondering his failure, Vanellope leapt out at him again. He'd known that she had to be coming, and he had stiffened his body in preparation for her "attack," but he was caught off guard once again – and scarlet code malfunctions rippled through his body in sync with his flashes of automatic fear.

"No good!" She sighed and took a step back, shaking her head disapprovingly as if at the repeated antics of a naughty pupil. "You're still not getting it."

"Aaaaaah…!" Turbo released an incoherent yell of rage, sprang to his feet, and delivered a swift kick to the bumper of his borrowed kart. The vehicle rocked on its wheels, but being the three-foot-tall glitchy weakling that he was, he didn't do any actual damage to it. Still, it felt good to finally hit something, even if his foot was now throbbing slightly. He plopped down on a gumdrop, his breaths hissing angrily between his teeth.

Ralph looked up at this miniature tantrum, seemingly amused by the racer's reaction.

"Jeez, Turbo, calm down," said Vanellope. "It's not that big of a deal."

"It is that big of a deal!" cried Turbo testily. "You try being a racer who can't race and tell me that it's not a big deal!"

Her nose crinkled up into an expression of dark distaste. "You've only been a glitch for like four days. Soon you won't even notice when it happens. Then it won't affect you when you're driving, and then you'll have enough control over it that you won't do it at all. And then you'll be able to use it to your advantage!" She disintegrated in a flash of blue static, only to reappear beside him half a second later. "Like me."

He scowled, refusing to look her in the eyes. "I hate being a glitch," he muttered.

"That’s sad, ‘cause you are a glitch, and you shouldn’t hate being you." She twirled a strand of her black hair around a chubby little finger. "If it makes you feel any better, you’re gonna get a break tomorrow. I'm going to enter tomorrow afternoon's noncompetitive. I haven't raced in one all week, and now my friends are starting to get suspicious."

His scowl may have deepened.

"Oh, what, are you going to miss me that much, Pajama Boy?" Her little pink tongue jabbed out at him. "It's okay, we'll be right back to glitch lessons over the weekend!"

"It's not that." Turbo sighed and stretched out his legs, flinching slightly as yet another glitch bubbled across his body. "I'm not exactly partial to your training, glitter-graphics, but it's better than being stuck up in the castle all day. It's so boring! And everyone treats me like I'm some sort of freak – when they even bother to pay attention to me at all, that is." His shoulders deflated.

She tilted her head curiously. "Felix doesn't treat you badly," she pointed out.

"No," he admitted, "but he's never really around, either." The only one who was ever around was that green gumball guy, AKA Sour Bill, who literally hadn’t spoken a single word to Turbo and looked at him as little as possible. Mostly Sour Bill would just periodically confirm Turbo’s location by peeping from around a corner, then take off before anyone could engage him.

Vanellope settled down for her knees. "Maybe once your driving gets steadier, I can show you around Sugar Rush!" she suggested. "Or, y'know, you could just hitch a ride on the back of my car like you usually do. Or we could walk."

Turbo cracked a smile. "Walking? What's that?" he joked weakly, and was pleased to see that this comment extracted a giggle from her.

Ralph chose this time to lumber over, presumably having sensed the direction that their conversation was taking. "I guess it's okay for you to show him around, kid," he told Vanellope. "But remember the number one rule. No going near the Royal Raceway, or anywhere else where the other racers might be hanging out."

Turbo frowned and glitched.

"What's wrong?" asked Vanellope.

"Why don't you want anybody to see me?" he demanded.

Ralph's eyes widened slightly, and he hurriedly answered, "I never said that we didn't want anybody to – "

"No, but it's beyond obvious," Turbo interrupted. "You keep me locked up in the castle, you don't want me to go anywhere near the other characters, and I'm pretty sure that you and Felix and Sergeant Calhoun are the only other people who even know I'm here. What's going on? Why am I such a big secret?"

Vanellope was sucking on her hoodie drawstrings anxiously. "Well…the other racers…might not be very accepting of you," she explained haltingly. "I mean, don't get me wrong, they're my friends and I like 'em a lot. But I don't know how they would react to…someone like you."

He glitched.

"But if you can show them that you're a good racer, they'll get over it!" she continued hurriedly. "And they'll have to listen to me if I tell them to let you race. I'm the president, after all."

His eyes dropped bitterly. "…I guess leaving the game is out of the question, too, huh?"

"Leaving the game is  _definitely_  out of the question!" proclaimed Ralph sternly, before quickly adding, "And why would you want to leave, anyway? The game lineup is pretty much completely new. Anyone you would've known before is probably gone."

_That's right_ , Turbo thought.  _They're gone. Just like Jet and Set_ …

He tried to avoid dwelling on his deceased friends, but without anything else to occupy him during the day, it was becoming harder and harder to not think about them.

"Hey," Vanellope piped up, with uncharacteristic amounts of sympathy (meaning: any at all) in her voice. "It's okay, Turbo. Don't be sad. I will show you around, and you will get to be a racer again, and maybe one day you'll even get to go back into Game Central Station! Until then, you just have to practice so you can get the hang of your glitch. I know that you'll be able to control it soon."

"Thanks, glitter-graphics," sighed Turbo, dredging up a smile from the bottom of his heart.

"No problem, Pajama Boy." She glitched herself into a standing position. "Now, c'mon, let's get home. Felix doesn't like us to be late for dinner."

She skipped back to her car, and he watched her for a moment before getting to his feet. Out of everyone he'd come to know since being brought here, Vanellope was the hardest for him to get an accurate read on. Felix was a kind, innocent, and somewhat naïve fatherly type who could be bashful around strangers but always had faith in his fixing abilities; Calhoun was a tough, no-nonsense, and constantly defensive drill sergeant who only ever let her guard down slightly around the people who she really and thoroughly trusted; and Ralph just seemed to be a grump, albeit one with an obvious soft spot for little Vanellope. But Turbo wasn't sure what to think about Vanellope herself. Sometimes, perhaps even a majority of the time, she acted like a typical hyper nine-year-old, but sometimes she'd be trying to train him and he would briefly snap at her or something, and she would completely transform. A frightened, traumatized child would peek out from behind her eyes, and it was during those moments that he became uncomfortably aware of the fact that she was wary of him – maybe not quite afraid, but certainly suspicious. And in another way, what he was noticing was curiosity, a desire to figure out who he really was…in other words, she was asking the same questions about him that he was about her.

Or maybe he was just seeing things that weren’t really there, the same way that, thirty years ago, he’d constantly been missing the things that should have been obvious.

* * *

 

"Oh, I see you're all back, and – Vanellope, what have I said about putting your racing goggles on the table?" Felix sighed and placed his hands on his hips. There was an apron tied around his waist emblazoned with the words  _Kiss the Cook_. He was the one who took control of the Sugar Rush kitchen for a few hours each evening to prepare dinner, partly because he was the only one who seemed to be able to procure foodstuffs other than sweets, and partly because no one else had any idea of how to cook. He fussed at Vanellope, Ralph, and Turbo as they entered the dining room, while Calhoun looked on from her seat at the table with an amused smirk. They were an odd pair, but as far as Turbo could see, they seemed genuinely happy together.

"Okay, okay!" submitted Vanellope, snatching her goggles off of the table and tucking them into the pouch of her sweatshirt. "Jeez, what are you, my dad or something?"

"Or something." Felix smiled. They were all well aware that if Vanellope considered anyone to be her father figure, then it was probably Ralph. "Go wash your hands, all three of you. Dinner in five."

In addition to Felix and Calhoun being a strange but content married couples, there were other connections between Turbo’s – supervisors? hosts? whatever you wanted to call them – that went beyond the nuptial. Ralph and Felix were practically brothers, their time together split between affection and arguments. Vanellope had no parents of her own, but had still ended up with someone besides her presidential attendants to look after her. And Ralph and Vanellope’s relationship fluctuated; sometimes they were best friends, sometimes more like a niece with her fun-loving uncle, and sometimes you couldn’t look at them without seeing a father and daughter. In short, the four of them had somehow become a close-knit family, albeit one in which the parental roles shifted between three people depending on what needed to be done, with Vanellope adding a fair amount of both sugar and spice to the dish.

Turbo wasn't a part of the family. He was an outsider that had been brought here for reasons he still didn't understand, and as he sat quietly at the dinner table that night and picked at his food, an envy stirred inside of him that wasn't unlike the jealousy he had once felt towards Road Blasters.

He  _was_  jealous, he admitted to himself, pushing the food around his plate with his yellow eyes downcast. He was jealous of Vanellope – not because she was a good racer, not because she had control over her glitch, but because of her family. She was a kid, and she was allowed to act her age because there were people around to take care of her. Turbo had always tried to assert that he didn't need anyone to be there for him, as long as he was a winner and could be there for himself, but as he watched Vanellope and Ralph banter back and forth at each other in a contest to devise the most creative insults, while Felix and Calhoun smiled into each other's eyes just like a couple of parents coming home from a long day at work…he couldn't lie to himself. Turbo wanted something like this, and maybe he always had.

"Say, are you all right, Turbo?" asked Felix. "You've hardly touched your dinner."

Turbo glanced up with a startled glitch, not having expected anyone to address him. "Huh? Oh, yeah, I'm fine. I'm just…not very hungry." He nudged his plate away halfheartedly.

Felix clicked his tongue sympathetically. "Getting discouraged from the glitch training, huh? It'll be okay! I'm sure that with a little more practice, you'll be on that racetrack in no time!"

"So everybody keeps telling me," murmured Turbo, his tone implying that he didn't believe this sentiment for a second.

"It's going to be fine, Turbo, really it is!" Felix clasped his hands on the table. "And you know that we're doing everything we can to help you. We all know how much you want to race again, so we're trying to get you there. We want you to be happy…"

Turbo continued to stare down at the table. "Well, I'm not happy, okay? And it's not your fault. I just…I don't belong here, and we all know it." His hands twisted into fists. "I'm a useless glitch, I can't race, I can't even drive, and I'm being treated like a criminal! Not by you, Felix, but by  _some_  people." He directed a quick glare towards Ralph.

The enormous wrecker huffed. "Look, kid, that's pretty tough talk for someone who doesn't even understand half of what's going on – "

"Ralph, don't!" hissed Felix, his face tight.

"No, he's right. I don't understand." Turbo scowled, and another brief glitch flickered through him. "I don't understand why you even bothered to help me when you clearly don't want me here! I'm not stupid, I can tell that I'm not welcome. So I don't know why you did this at all!" He narrowed his eyes challengingly.

"Because leaving someone to die when you have the means and ability to help them isn't just apathy, it's cruelty!" responded Felix sincerely. "I've been around for thirty years, and I've seen what happens to people when they lose their games. Heck, it almost happened to my game not that long ago! But I got another chance, and I was so thankful for it that now I guess I've taken it upon myself to help out other homeless characters who need it. So when we found you, Turbo, it just seemed…well…like the right thing to do." He glanced over at Ralph and Calhoun. "Isn't that right, Ralph, Tammy?"

Calhoun hesitated, then dipped her head in an affirmative nod. "Part of the code of honor is to never leave a man behind if you can help it," she stated gruffly, but Turbo detected some reluctance in her words.

Ralph didn't say anything.

"I'm done eating," Turbo muttered, pushing away his plate. His chair scraped against the hard candy-tiled floor as he hurried out, shutting the door behind him. But he lingered by the entrance to the dining room, somehow anticipating that the conversation would continue as soon as he was out of the room.

His intuition proved to be correct.

" _This is why I can't stand teenagers_ ," complained Ralph, once he believed Turbo to be out of earshot. " _I mean, look at him! Look at how he's acting! He's the exact same hotshot that he was before, only now even more whiney because he can't race yet!_ "

" _Oh, give him a break, Ralph_ ," pleaded Felix. " _He's going through some confusing times right now. Waking up one day with a glitch, finding out that your game was unplugged, not being able to remember the past thirty years…it must be a lot to cope with."_

" _Oh, please,"_  Ralph scoffed.  _"He's just looking for attention. I can remember that much about him: he was never happy unless all eyes were on him, and if throwing a tantrum was the easiest way to be the star of the show, he'd do it."_

Vanellope piped up, " _He's not…that bad. At least he isn't crazy now…_ "

" _Or at least, that's what it looks like so far. Just keep your guard up, Vanellope. Don't get too comfy around him, no matter how sane he seems."_

" _He's not in any danger of reverting!"_ protested Felix, exasperation entering the patient handyman's voice for the first time. " _And he'll be in even less danger once he feels happy here. We just need to give him some time…it's only been a few days, after all. And as for you, Ralph,_ " he continued, his voice becoming stern, " _you need to be more careful about what you say around him. I think he already suspects that there's something he doesn't know, and…"_

" _And he can't ever know!"_ Calhoun finished for him. " _Not unless we want a disaster like last time on our hands."_

Turbo's brow had crinkled low over his eyes, and he pressed himself against the wall, breathing deeply. Where did these conversational fragments fit in with the things he had already heard; how did they develop the half-formed suspicions already lurking in the back of his mind? He felt as if the more he learned, the more he became aware of how much he didn't know. But one thing stood out to him even more than the comments about his sanity and "a disaster like last time."

Felix hadn't said “not being _around_ for thirty years.” He’d said “not being able to _remember_.”

Turbo glitched, and he was so absorbed in his thoughts that he hardly noticed the ripple of pixels. "What's going on here?" he asked the open air, his voice a dark little whisper. "What are you all hiding from me?"


	7. Touchy

Turbo's dream that night started out so innocently, which made it all the more terrifying when things began to twist and darken.

_He was walking down a long, straight corridor in the castle, not the one that he always took to get to and from his room, but a different one with lavishly patterned wallpaper and a carpet so plush that he sank into it nearly past his ankles. Everything was as quiet and empty as ever, but in a peaceful, dignified way, as if this place were inhabited by a hugely important presence who would surely return soon. For a while, it was pleasant enough just to keep walking, enjoying the fact that in his dream world, he could at least be free of his glitch._

_The only odd thing was the pictures._

_The walls were covered with them: portraits, some paintings and some photographs, in various shapes and sizes, but all depicting the same character. Turbo’s eyes flitted curiously over the multitudes of just one face. The subject of the portraits was a portly old man – a king, judging from the crown on his head – with a kindly face, rosy cheeks, and a nose as red and round and plump as a tomato._

_Turbo began to feel uneasy, troubled by the sensation that every flat face’s eyes were somehow watching him. Also, why would there be a corridor in Sugar Rush filled with pictures of royalty who didn’t exist? The explanation that he was dreaming didn’t occur to him; instead, he became convinced that he’d stumbled upon a part of the mystery that the others were keeping from him._

_Suddenly, the corridor ended, not in a turn or a door or a set of stairs, but in a flat wall that forced him to stop up short. The wall was adorned with a gilded frame that was as tall as he was. At first he thought that it was empty, but then he realized that it was actually a mirror, reflecting the world back at him. When he approached it, his own face appeared, as ghostly-white as ever._

_He frowned, gently laying his fingers against the cool silver surface of the mirror. Who’d commission dozens of portraits of themselves, and then stick a mirror in the place of honor? Well, whatever. There didn’t seem to be anything important down here after all. He glanced over his shoulder, searching for an exit._

_“I know what you’re looking for,” said a voice._

_Turbo whirled back towards the mirror, and now it wasn’t a mirror, but a window looking out into an identical corridor. At least, that was what he thought it must have been, because someone was standing where his reflection had previously been, exactly at eye level. The king._

_Turbo frowned. “I just want to get out of here…”_

_“Leave? But you’ve only just come back!” proclaimed the king, smiling sweetly. He had a singsong voice that lisped heavily on each sibilant.  “This is a golden opportunity for you, Turbo!”_

_“An opportunity to do_ what _?”_

_The king moved his hand over his heart, as if shocked. “Oh, no. It seems that you don’t remember…”_

_“What?” asked Turbo. “What am I s'posed to remember?”_

_The smile turned into a grin. And the now the king was turning into –_

_Turbo gasped and recoiled._

_The king was fading, contorting, melting into what was unmistakably a twisted parody of the young racer in front of him. Even though Turbo (being the ghost boy that he was) disliked looking at himself in mirrors, he had never before been so terrified an image of himself. This other version of him shared all his basic features – the white skin, the yellow eyes set in dark hollows, the toothy yellow grin, the bleached racing jumpsuit and helmet – and yet it was so contorted, so monstrous, that he refused to believe that it was really him._

_He tried to look away, but now every portrait in the hall had changed as well, taunting him with this thing that was him and wasn't him. Then his gaze was ripped back to the mirror as the figure inside reached right through the glass, gripping his shoulders and leering with its huge stretched mouth_

_"Do you remember now, Turbo?" it asked. Its voice was the same as the king’s, which shouldn't have been threatening but somehow was._

_He couldn’t make a sound. He felt invisible hands all over him, pressing him into place, binding his throat. Somehow he was convinced that the paintings had all come alive and were holding him there._

" _You don't remember? Well, you will." The thing started to cackle. "You will, and very soon!"_

_And Turbo's entire body exploded into static – not just in a normal glitchy way, but in an excruciatingly painful way that felt as if something was trying to detach itself from underneath the pores of his skin. He screamed –_

"Pajama Boy!"

Turbo shouted once more at the significantly less threatening voice of Vanellope, before the room snapped back into focus around him. He was in his own bedroom in the Sugar Rush castle, sitting up in bed, and glitching all over. His pulse beat away in his throat, informing him that yes, he had screamed in real life. He exhaled in a shaky little huff.

Vanellope was seated at the edge of his bed, her button nose scrunched up in an irritatingly cute manner. "What happened?" she demanded. "You were thrashing and screeching, and – "

"What are you doing in my room?" he interrupted. He tried to glare at her, but found that he was still too exhausted and shaken from his nightmare to manage it.

She crossed her arms. "I was up for a glass of water and I heard you in here, making a lot of noise. At first I thought that you weren't even asleep. Did you know that you talk in your sleep?"

Turbo just gave her a deadpan look.

"Well, anyway, I peeked in, and you were just saying, 'No, no, no, no' over and over. Then you screamed. And then you woke up. And now here I am!" She tilted her head curiously. "What were you dreaming about?"

He blinked, his sleep-fuzzed mind still slow on the uptake. "Walking," he answered slowly. "I was just…walking through the castle."

"Really? That’s it?" she scoffed. "Cause it sounded like a nightmare to me."

"It was." The events of the dream were fading away from him, and he grasped at the last dregs of memory, fruitlessly attempting to piece something cohesive together. "I think I was…I don't know, being attacked, maybe? And there was somebody else there? I can't quite remember…"

"Can't remember, or don't want to talk about it?"

"Mmf…" As the last remnants of his adrenaline rush drained away, his mouth stretched open in a yawn, and he fell back against the marshmallow pillow. "Can't remember. Doesn't matter, anyway. Now if you'll excuse me, glitter-graphics, it's the middle of the night and I'd like to go back to sleep."

"Same here. Nighty-night, Pajama Boy." Vanellope wriggled off of his bed, and her long nightgown went  _whssk-whssk_ against the floor as she tiptoed out. As soon as he heard the door click shut, Turbo rolled over and closed his eyes, want of sleep immediately overpowering the fragmented recollections of his nightmare.

But just before he dropped into slumber again, he could have sworn that he heard someone laugh ever so quietly, close enough that they might have been right next to his ear. It was a jolly chuckle, but if he had been more alert, he knew that it would have sent a shivering glitch down his body.

" _Hoo-hoo-hoo…"_

* * *

 

Every single Sunday, Litwak's Arcade was closed in order to give its owner and namesake a weekend break. The extended time off had always been a perk for the game characters, who used the opportunity to get together, relax, party, and generally goof off and hobnob. It was Turbo's first Sunday in the arcade since his reawakening, and he was pleased to see that this sacred ritual still stood. Instead of being stuck in his bedroom while the others got to participate in the gaming, everyone was free for the day. And Vanellope's big plan for this afternoon was to take him on a grand tour of Sugar Rush.

"C'mon, Pajama Boy!" she exclaimed, bouncing as she dragged him through the halls by the sleeve of his jumpsuit. "Hop to it! Move your molasses! The arcade's not gonna stay closed forever, you know!"

"We've got plenty of time!" he protested, stumbling along behind her. He wasn't exactly slow, but between her nine-year-old hyper-ness and her speed glitching, he found that he always had a hard time trying to keep pace with her.

Ralph and Felix were standing around in the throne room by the time the young duo arrived. Vanellope scampered up to her two caretakers eagerly, while Turbo leaned against the doorway, thankful for the opportunity to catch his breath. "We're going out now!" declared Vanellope, hopping from one foot to the other. "We're going out to see Sugar Rush like you said we could. We can still do it, right?"

Ralph reached up a massive hand to rub the back of his neck. "Wait, right now? Uh…sorry, kid, but there's a Bad Anon meeting today, and I was kind of hoping that I could stop by…"

Vanellope's face puckered up in disappointment and irritation, but before she could deflate completely, Felix stepped in to save the discussion. "But that doesn't mean you can't go, Vanellope! Ralph, you go on ahead to your Bad Anon meeting. I'm sure that Turbo and Vanellope can handle themselves just fine."

The wrecker faltered, his agape mouth showing off the gap between his front teeth. "…you're going to let them go alone?!" His eyebrows pulled taut. "Felix, I don't care what you say, I am not letting Vanellope go off by herself with… _him_!"

At this point, Turbo stomped over to them, fizzing from an indignant glitch. He'd just about had it with Ralph's bad attitude towards him, and for once, he wasn't going to clam up and pout while even more restrictions were placed upon him. "What the what do you think I'm gonna do that's so bad, Mister Wreck-It?" he demanded, drawing himself up to the apex of his pitiful height.

Ralph's eyes widened, and his fingers twitched as if he was planning to snatch up the estranged racer for this perceived challenge to his authority, until Felix intervened once again. He placed a calming hand on his friend's elbow. "He has a point, Ralph. Turbo hasn't done anything wrong…I think we can trust him enough to go out for just a couple of hours, can't we? He's been very well-behaved, so what reason do we have to say no?"

"What  _reason_?" Ralph breathed out, eyes still narrowed and glinting dangerously.

Turbo perked up, wobbling on his tiptoes as he anticipated that he might finally be about to hear something to give him a revelation.  _Come on, just say a little more! Tell me the reason! Tell me why you've been treating me so poorly ever since I first got here!_

"Ralph!" pleaded Felix, his gloved fingers digging into the larger man's beefy arm. If Ralph decided to pitch a fit, then in all likelihood Felix wouldn't be able to do anything except repair the damage afterwards, but something about the desperate tone of his voice gave all four of them pause. Ralph's shoulders slumped, and he wiped the look of incomprehensible rage from his eyes, replacing it with an ordinary distrusting scowl.

"Fine then!" he growled. "I'm going to my meeting. But if these two aren't home by the time I get back, then we're sending Winchell and Duncan after them!"

Vanellope made a face that clearly conveyed her level of confidence in the two donut policemen.

Felix waited until Ralph had made his hasty departure before placing a hand on Turbo's shoulder comfortingly. Turbo, taken aback by the gesture, gave an involuntary glitch. "I'm sorry about all of this," sighed Felix. "Ralph is just…he's very protective of Vanellope. He doesn't like the idea of something happening to her while he's not around…"

"I can take care of myself!" protested Vanellope, her lower lip jutting out.

"And I wouldn't let anything happen, anyway," added Turbo. "Honestly, guys, what's the big deal about me being out on my own? It's not like I didn't spend six years without any adult supervision in Turbo Time…"

Vanellope giggled from behind her hand.

"Oh, what's so funny, glitter-graphics?"

"'It'sth not like I didn't sthpend sthix yearsth without adult sthupervision…'" she mimicked. "You talk funny, Turbo. I don't notice it all the time, but sometimes, it  _really_  shows."

Turbo frowned. "I do not lisp like that!"

"You have a little bit of a lisp, Turbo," placated Felix, his voice remaining even and soothing. "Not a very pronounced one, but it's there. And it's nothing to be ashamed about – "

"Yeah, you're just ever stho sthlightly listhpy!" Vanellope was overtaken by delighted cackles, and she slapped her knee at the hilarity of her own joke.

Turbo rolled his eyes, hardly noticing as he glitched again. This was why he had such a difficult time trying to figure out the sugar-brat; every time she displayed some hint of genuine kindness towards him, no matter how large or how small, she always negated it with something like this. And…there were still those intermittent moments where he caught her staring at him like she was seeing someone else entirely. It was becoming a less frequent phenomenon now, but every so often, he still noticed it happening.

"Vanellope, it's not nice to make fun of other peoples' speech impediments," Felix scolded lightly, before a discomfited flush sprang to his cheeks. "N-not that you have a speech impediment, Turbo! All I meant was…"

"We know what you meant," Vanellope snickered. Her hand closed around Turbo's sleeve. "Come on, Pajama Boy, let's go!"

"Don't go too far!" Felix called after them as she scampered out the door, with Turbo once again stumbling along in her grasp. "And be home in time for dinner!"

Vanellope immediately made a beeline for the side of her road, where her kart was parked and perched on its wheels as if in anticipation. "I assume that you're going to be my chauffer again?" quipped Turbo, who was still (much to his chagrin) unable to drive safely.

"You  _asthume_  right," she responded cheekily, and he crossed his arms at this repeated exaggeration of his slight lisp. "Oh, not funny anymore, huh?"

He plopped himself down on the back of her car. "Let's just get on with the tour, okay?"

The engine began to grumble and vibrate a moment later, but she didn't put her foot on the gas pedal just yet. Instead, she leaned over the back of her seat to gaze at him meaningfully. "You're pretty touchy, you know that?"

"I'm not touchy!" Turbo crossed his arms tightly over his chest. "I just don't like it when people make fun of me!"

"It's only joking around, Turbo."

"Easy for you to say. How would you like it if people were always calling you a freak or a stupid kid or a ghost boy – " He cut himself off, realizing that he was becoming far too personal.

Vanellope tilted her head. "Ghost…boy?" she inquired curiously.

He released a huffy breath. "Yeah. That's the name that people used to tease me with. You know, because I look like…" He gestured to himself.

"Huh." She blinked at him sedately. "Well, I can safely say that I've never heard that one before." With that, she shifted her kart into gear and pulled onto the road, this time bypassing the street that led to Sweet Ride. As a matter of fact, she made hardly any turns as the minutes passed, only following the gradual curves of the main road. He had expected a scenic route with a lot of looping and backtracking, but even without that, he was still farther into Sugar Rush now than he had ever been before.

"Where are we going?" he asked. "I mean, you're driving like you've got somewhere specific in mind."

"I do! We're going to the best place to get a view of the game." As she spoke, they passed beneath a sign bearing an inscription, in a curling and embellished font:  _Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow – Come Back Soon!_

Turbo glanced down and saw that the road beneath them had apparently turned into a crystallized rainbow, which arched up towards the mountains towering over the horizon and vanished into a dark circular hole. It took him a moment before he figured out what he was looking at. "Are we leaving the game or something?"

"No, we're not allowed to. That is, _I’m_ allowed to, but I’m not s’posed to leave you alone." As they continued up the incline, he found himself leaning forward to clutch the back of her chair with all his might, but Vanellope was unperturbed. At last, they rolled to a halt just in front of the cavernous exit towards Game Central Station. "Just look."

He lowered his dangling feet to the ground, took a step forward, and stared.

She hadn't been kidding about the view. From their current vantage point, the entire game map was visible, and the candy-coated features came together in a magnificent construct of design work. The castle that he had been cooped up in was a swirling confection from a children's fairy tale now, not just a gilded cage, and Diet Cola Mountain punctuated the skyline like a giant raised index finger, scudded cotton candy clouds swirling around its peak. Best of all, racetracks of every kind were laced together throughout the land, crossing earth and sea and sky, entwined with lacy precision like a doily. He could see the multicolored sprinkles that must have been the other racers as they darted back and forth, competing in the daily noncompetitive races, and every so often the spectators would send up a muffled cheer. Far in the distance, a factory of some sort released multicolored plumes from its smoke stacks. And it seemed that every patch of empty space was taken up by a milk chocolate pond or a grove of candy cane trees.

Vanellope appeared at his side in a blue crackle. "Isn't it awesome?" she asked with a smile. "Sometimes I'll just come up here, not to go out to Game Central, I mean, but just to look. It's a good place to sit and think. Plus, I can survey my kingdom, being the president and all!" She spread out her arms proudly.

Turbo glanced down at her. "Um, I'm pretty sure that presidents don't have kingdoms."

"Fine, whatever. It's my president…dom." Her tongue, which was blotted with multicolored candy stains, poked out at him. "It's mine, anyway."

"It's nice," he admitted, walking around the top of the rainbow bridge nonchalantly. All of a sudden, he was painfully conscious of the exit behind him. Sugar Rush  _was_  nice and all, but could he help it if he had a little cabin fever after being stuck here for so long? Anyway, he wasn't planning to go anywhere. He was just going to take a little peek down the tunnel…

His feet and his brain inched him closer, despite the fact that a sensation in his gut informed him that even peeking probably wasn't the best thing to do right now. Even so, his neck was stretching out now, and just as the very tip of his nose was about to pass from the boundaries of the game –

"Gah!" He cried out and stumbled back as a blue force field suddenly exploded in front of his face, rippling across the entryway as if a stone had been tossed into a puddle of pure energy. Blinking in shock, he reached up a hand incredulously, rubbing the spot where his nose had made contact. Vanellope spun around to face him immediately, her eyebrows ruffling.

"Pajama Boy, what are you doing over there?" she demanded.

"I was just looking!" protested Turbo. "And all of a sudden, something…" He extended his arm experimentally, moving slowly this time. Just as his hand was about to reach into the tunnel, his palm connected with what felt like a solid surface, and more azure distortions flickered across the surface of the invisible barrier. "…what  _is_  this?"

Her eyes had now become round with surprise and understanding. "Oh," she murmured.

"Oh  _what_?" Just then, he glitched, and the force field delivered an electric shock through his pixilated hand and into the rest of his body. He hopped back with a short yelp of pain.

"Come on, Turbo, get away from there." She closed her fingers around his sleeve. "You'll just hurt yourself."

"What was that?!" he pressed. "It's like I can't leave the game or somethi – " He cut himself off as comprehension slammed into him like a bludgeon to the head.

It had been like he couldn't leave the game, because that was exactly what it was. Turbo was a glitch now. And glitches couldn't leave their games.

"Oh," he said, his voice dropping down to the same resigned whisper that hers had been a moment ago. " _Oh_."

She bit her lip. "Yeah. I probably should have warned you, but I mean, we weren't sure if…well, nothing we can do about it now."

Wordlessly, Turbo lowered himself down so that he was seated on the edge of the rainbow bridge, his legs dangling over the scenery below. It had been awful enough when his glitch prevented him from fulfilling his purpose, but now this as well… "It's okay," he sighed. "I didn't really want to go out there, anyway. I wouldn't recognize anything."

Vanellope nodded, a bit too over-eagerly. "Yeah! We've got plenty to explore here, and you don't even really need to go outside! Plus, this works out kind of good, because if anybody saw you out there, they would…" She trailed off, biting down on her tongue a little too late.

Turbo angled his head towards her curiously. "…they would what?"

"…they would…uh…be really freaked out because they thought you were dead for a really long time," she answered hurriedly.

"I guess so." He shrugged noncommittally. "Nobody ever liked me in the first place, so it doesn't really matter."

Her face became thoughtful at that, but after a brief pause, all she said was, "Come on, let's finish the tour."

Mixed emotions coursed through him as he clambered atop her kart again. A numbness settled in the pit of his stomach; it was as if he, unsure of what to feel, had automatically shifted into feeling nothing at all. Still, he didn't regret coming up here. He would have had to figure out that he was barred from exiting the game sooner or later, and besides, the view from the top of the rainbow bridge really was lovely.

And for once, as Vanellope drove off again, he didn't even glitch.

* * *

 

They traveled the winding pathways of the game, and Vanellope pointed out the locations of notable landmarks, areas like Sugar Square and the kart bakery (the factory that he had glimpsed earlier) and a few of the themed racetracks as they passed. One thing that she was careful to avoid, however, was any other racers or citizens who might see them. With all that he had heard and deduced so far, Turbo was seriously beginning to doubt that he was only being kept a secret because of his creepy looks and sudden reappearance.

On their way back to the castle, the very thing that he had been fearing since he'd started bumming rides on the Vanellope’s car finally happened: she hit a bump in the road at high speed, and when his frantically scrabbling fingers failed to find purchase, he went toppling off and tumbling towards the side of the road. Fortunately, they happened to be in an area where whipped cream was especially abundant, so he had a soft landing. Unfortunately, Turbo had never actually wanted the experience of becoming submerged in whipped cream.

"Oh, Turbo, are you okay?!" exclaimed Vanellope as she bolted towards him, speed-glitching to push herself along. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that…" As soon as she got a look of him, pretty much a pile of white with red sneakers at the bottom and two glowering yellow eyes peering out, she doubled over laughing.

"Thanks so much, glitter-graphics," he groaned as he did his best to scrape the whipped cream away from his face. Cautiously, he licked his fingertip, and sweet fluffiness danced across his taste buds. Well, he supposed that there were worse substances to be covered in.

"Hey, look on the bright side." She grinned at him. "At least it's white. It won't stain those pajamas of yours, since nobody will be able to tell the difference!"

She was interrupted when Turbo swung his arm hard enough to land a well-aimed glob of cream directly on her nose. Her hazel eyes widened, and for a moment, he wondered if he had gone too far, if his retaliation had angered her. Then…

"You are so gonna get it now!" she squealed gleefully, diving into the pile and grabbing fistfuls of whipped cream to hurl at him like snowballs.

Thirty minutes later, they would finally return home after a lengthy cream fight. They would be slightly late for dinner, true, and Felix would be especially cross when they had to explain why they were both coated in gloppy white deliciousness, but Turbo didn't care. It was the first time in he-couldn't-remember-how-long that he had actually had fun.


	8. Level up

The days zoomed by to the rhythm of the racecar engines always buzzing throughout Sugar Rush. Things were changing, albeit so slowly that Turbo hardly noticed at first. During gaming hours, he was still cooped up in the castle, with nothing to do except get stared at by Sour Bill and gaze with increasingly longing eyes at the other racers as they had fun far in the distance. It was Felix who finally attempted to remedy the situation of boredom.

"Turbo, it's not good for you to be sitting around all day doing nothing," the handyman remarked early one morning. "Do you have any other, non-racing hobbies? Something that your glitch wouldn't interfere with?"

"Uh…" Turbo clasped his hands behind his back as slight, embarrassed glitches sparked in his limbs. "Well, there is one thing, but it's kind of weird…" He rocked on his feet uncomfortably.

Felix arched an eyebrow. "What is it?"

Turbo told him, and Felix smiled warmly upon hearing the request that followed. "Not a problem at all. I can fix it."

He went to work, and upon his return, he had procured four rolls of multicolored yarn and a slender metal implement, which was hooked at one end. Turbo thanked him for the materials and, still feeling slightly humiliated, set to work that same night. Predictably, when Vanellope skipped into his room the following afternoon to fetch him for glitch lessons, she nearly fell on the floor laughing when she saw what he was doing.

" _Knitting?_  Really, Pajama Boy?! You knit?!" She cackled like a maniac. "Just when I thought that you couldn't get any prissier!"

Turbo, who was sitting cross-legged on his bed with an amount of red yarn in his lap, frowned and lowered his needle. "I'm not prissy! And this isn't knitting, it's  _crochet_!"

That only made her laugh harder, since apparently she couldn't see the difference.

He rolled his eyes and set his project, the beginnings of what would eventually become a scarf, to the side of his bed. "Go ahead, make fun of me all you want," he sighed, his voice warping slightly on the last word as he glitched briefly. "But it's not like I have anything else to do around here while you're out there racing!"

"How do you even know how to knit?" she asked, swiping away the moisture that had accumulated in her eyes during her giggling fit.

"It's kind of a long story." His gaze drifted up towards the ceiling. "See, this one year during Christmas, me and Jet and Set got started talking about Christmas sweaters. Don't ask, it's really hard to explain. Anyway, this led to us having a contest to see who could find the most ugliest sweater in the arcade, but I decided that instead of going on a scavenger hunt to get one, I was just gonna make one myself. So I did."

Vanellope batted her eyelashes at him. "And…was it really ugly?"

"It sure was. I won the contest with Jet and Set hands-down. But it was weird because after that, I figured out that I kind of liked crochet. It's all…I dunno, it was kind of relaxing. It still is." He swung his feet nonchalantly. "I glitch less when I'm doing it."

"Are you making another ugly sweater now?" She padded over to his bedside, but he stuffed his work in progress beneath the pillow before she could get her hands on it. "Aww, c'mon, let me see it!"

"It's a scarf, not a sweater. And it's not ugly," he corrected her defensively. "At least, I hope it won't be. I'm usually better with scarves than I am with bigger stuff – "

"And did you really teach yourself to knit?" she interrupted, hardly paying any mind to his answers. His hidden skill seemed to be nothing more than a running joke to her. "You just sat down one day and boom, you could do it?"

He shook his head. "I never said that I taught myself, glitter-graphics. Felix was the one who showed me the basics."

That snatched up her attention, and she plopped down on the bed next to him, arching one eyebrow dramatically. “Really? I thought you said that nobody in the arcade liked you,” she challenged.

"Yeah, but…Felix likes everybody,” admitted Turbo, and she flashed him a little grin of agreement. "Felix and I weren't exactly what you would call friends. We just happened to know each other in passing. I remember talking to him every now and again because he was actually nice to me. But, y’know, what else can you expect from a guy who lives in _Nice_ land?"

It had been a while since such menial recollections of his past had occurred to him, but those little tidbits of his history were surprisingly sharp in his mind; he remembered how he and Jet and Set had bargained each other into that ugly sweater contest, and the day that he had sat cross-legged on the floor in Felix's apartment, working with yarn and a crocheting needle for the first time. Felix had been standing over him, chuckling good-naturedly.  _"I never thought that a kid like you would want to learn anything like this!"_ he had declared. Turbo's reply had been, predictably,  _"I'm not a kid."_

Those were memories of events from over thirty years ago, and he could still call up the specific details in his brain. He'd always had a pretty good memory. Which made it all the more perplexing that there was a gap of three decades in his head that, try as he might, he found himself utterly unable to access…

Vanellope's lips parted as a questioning look assembled itself on her face…then she quickly glitched herself to a standing position and cleared her throat seriously. "Enough of your knitting for today, Pajama Boy. We've got some glitching to do."

"I know, I know." Turbo's snub nose crinkled up as he dragged himself to his feet reluctantly. He had nothing against Vanellope or the fact that she was attempting to help him, really and truly he didn't, but he all too often felt that he wasn't making any headway in his glitch training at all.

But he was.

His pixel problems were becoming more and more infrequent, now, until they pretty much only occurred during moments of high emotional tension. And when he did glitch, he hardly noticed it at all. He no longer felt as if he would shatter into a million pieces every time strands of scarlet binary flickered across his body. And that was why, by the end of his second week in Sugar Rush, Vanellope told him that he could get back behind the wheel of the generic borrowed kart.

And he drove it – at a slower speed than he would have preferred, admittedly, but he didn't crash.

As he was cruising along Sweet Ride in that car, the notion that he could become a true, successful racer in this game suddenly seemed real and tangible to him. He no longer had to grasp at an abstract notion, because his goal – the return to his purpose – was almost in sight. And perhaps it was the spark of optimism ignited in him by this realization that caused him to begin improving much more rapidly from that point onward.

Sure enough, a measly three days after he had really started driving again, Vanellope stopped up short halfway through their daily lesson and made a statement that was music to his ears: "Come on, Pajama Boy, let's race."

* * *

 

This would be Turbo's first race in, well, thirty years. He was grateful that he had only been awake and aware for a short period of time. He'd had a hard enough time going a couple of weeks without racing; three conscious decades would have been nothing but a period of long, drawn-out torture.

He scooted around in his seat as he waited at the starting line, the kart engine trilling gently beneath him. Though he’d been practicing with it for a while now, this vehicle still felt clunky and foreign, and he pined for his old Red Rocket. Still, beggars couldn't be choosers, so he didn't vocalize these complaints. At this point, he was so eager to start zooming down the track again that even a pedal-powered junk pile would have been all right with him.

Vanellope was in her car beside him, and she tapped the gas pedal without shifting into gear, producing an obnoxious revving noise to snatch his attention. "We'll go for two laps," she announced. "I'll play fair and I won't speed-glitch. If you feel like you're gonna crash, you know what to do."

He nodded, his yellow eyes owlish behind their protective goggles. In addition to learning glitch control, he had also been instructed in several methods of crash safety since his arrival in this game.

"Ready to race, buddy boy?"

"I was  _born_  ready to race!" he responded, wrapping his fingers around the steering wheel.

"I'll bet." She grinned at him. "Okay then, on your mark…"

He transferred his foot to the brake pedal.

"Get set…"

He twisted the lollipop gearshift, holding the kart steady with the brake, sensing that it was ready to leap forward at the barest little push.

"GO!"

Turbo slammed his foot on the gas – there was no need to be delicate about it, really – and tore off down the road, a spray of cocoa dust billowing out from behind him. His senses were sharpening now, and his perception expanded to envelop as much of the course as he could see, ready to sound alarm bells at him at a moment's notice.  _Don't think, just react. Just race. Let the programming take over…_

Here was the first major turn; he spun the wheel, expertly hugging the broad side of the curve. Unfortunately, he had taken it a bit too wide, and Vanellope zipped on by him. That was okay. Most of the time, what happened during the beginning of the race didn't really matter compared to what happened at the end.

Red pixels crackled up his spine like a chill on a breezy day, but he ignored the slight glitch and merely focused on driving. As long as his vision wasn't being obstructed and he still had control of his limbs, he was fine. He wasn't going to let his glitchy tendencies throw him off the road anymore.

A crystalline cube hovered in front of him, and he shifted into a higher gear as the front of his car connected with it, blinking as glitter fizzled into the air around him. Vanellope had told him what these things were, but he had never actually used one before. "POWER UP!" a voice shouted out of nowhere, and a button on his dashboard lit up with a small illustration of a cherry.  _Cherry Bomb_.

"Okay, let's see what you can do," he muttered, his gaze flicking down for half a second as he pressed his thumb against the button.

An oversized cherry materialized out of nowhere on the track behind him and detonated with a sound like a balloon popping. It didn't exactly help him get in front of his competitor, but it was more than he'd ever had in Turbo Time, anyway. Besides, there were supposed to be many different kinds of power-ups that came from those sugar cubes, so he was sure to come across a useful one eventually.

Just ahead of him, he spotted a puddle of slick-looking green liquid. Now  _this_  was something that he'd definitely seen before – it was the equivalent of the oil spills he'd had to navigate past in Turbo Time. He skirted around the edge of the puddle expertly, and the back of Vanellope's car came into view. He wasn't that far behind her, and as he came up to the starting line once again, he knew that he still had an entire lap to overtake her.

Excitement sparked inside of him, but unfortunately, it wasn't the only thing sparking. Glitch glitch. He set his teeth, eyes narrowing behind the goggles into an expression of utmost determination. His glitch was  _not_  going to control him. He was going to race again, and he wasn't going to let something like a minor code malfunction ruin it for him!

Over the straights, around the turns, faster and faster and faster…Turbo was catching up to her now. He saw the little sugar-coated girl glancing in her rearview mirror repeatedly, taking note of how close he was getting. She beeped her horn at him playfully. In response, he nuzzled his front bumper against the back of her kart ever so gently, his gas pedal pressed nearly to the floor so that he could keep matching her speed.

They were neck-in-neck as they returned to the line of power-up blocks, and Turbo swerved to the side slightly in order to snag one. This time, the button on his dashboard showed an illuminated image of two little sugar cubes. He had just been awarded the game's namesake ability: Sugar Rush, and it was just what he needed. He slammed his finger on the button again, and was immediately propelled just in front of Vanellope by a hefty speed boost.

"Hey!" she squealed, leaning forward in her seat as he sped by.

Turbo was now grinning like an idiot, but he didn't care. He held himself in first position long enough to cross the finish line, and then he immediately pulled his car to the side of the road, leaping out with a fist held triumphantly in the air. "YES! Turbo-Tastic!"

Vanellope snickered as she rolled to a halt alongside him. "Nice job, Pajama Boy!" she praised. "And hey, you said the thing! I mean, I know that Turbo-Tastic is supposed to be like your catchphrase, but I don't think that I've ever actually heard you  _say_  it since you've been here."

"That's because things haven't been so Turbo-Tastic for me." He bounced on his feet a bit, the delighted smile never wavering on his face. "But now they are! I'm finally racing again!"

"Yeah, you've passed Level One!" She extended her first towards him, and he gave her knuckles a friendly tap. "Now you can drive without your glitch messing you up. So it's time to level up! Starting tomorrow, we'll meet at the Cakeway, and you can work on not glitching at all while you're racing. And that means that we'll be racing a lot more often!"

"Turbo-Tastic!" he repeated enthusiastically, and she giggled.

They plopped down together on a couple of gumdrops to take a much-needed rest; Turbo had nearly forgotten how exhausting a good race could be. Vanellope seemed to be in a particularly cheery mood, and she was all smiles as she looked over at him. "You're doing good, Pajama Boy. Really, you are. All you hafta do is keep working on controlling that glitch, and you'll be ready for the roster in no time!"

"Thanks, glitter-graphics." He kicked his foot along the ground as something occurred to him. "Say…do you mind if I ask you kind of a weird question?"

"Go ahead."

"Before you were the president, was there somebody else in charge here? A king, maybe?"

As soon as the words had departed his mouth, he knew that something was wrong. Vanellope stiffened all over, and in her oversized eyes, he could see…something. He couldn’t quite identify the emotion. "Why…" She swallowed, treading carefully as she tried to devise a good way of answering him. "Why would you even ask something like that?"

"Well, I've been having these funny dreams…"

The plague of nightmares had still been assailing Turbo, not every single night, but still too often for comfort. He had awakened screaming several more times since that first day that Vanellope had crept into his room. Sometimes the dark, twisted fantasies focused on Turbo Time being unplugged, and those at least made sense to him. But for some reason, he was also having recurring dreams about that jolly-looking old king, with the plump red nose and the crinkly red bowtie and purple tailcoats, who really did seem to belong to the Sugar Rush universe. So many of Turbo's nightmares had ended with this king warping into that grotesque parody of Turbo himself, leering, " _Remember, remember…you don't remember yet, Turbo…but you will…_ "

"I keep seeing a man who looks like a king," continued Turbo quietly, his eyes dropping to the fudgy ground in shame. "And he looks like he came from this game."

Vanellope shoved her hands into the pouch of her sweatshirt, but he still saw that she was trembling lightly. "There did used to be a king here," she admitted. "An evil king. But he's gone now…"

He leaned towards her, wrinkling his snub nose as he finally recognized her expression for what it was. "…you're afraid of him, aren't you?"

"No, I'm not!" she protested indignantly. "It’s just that he's…well, he's the reason why I'm a glitch. See, he was going to be the ruler of the game until the programmers decided that they wanted a princess instead, so they made me. But he…got loose, and he ripped up my coding and locked up everybody's memories, and made himself the lead character. So everybody hated me and called me a glitch and I wasn't allowed to race, even though I really, really wanted to, and I didn't have any friends, and I had to live by myself in an old abandoned bonus level, and…" She inhaled sharply and shook her head, making a physical attempt to dispel the bad thoughts.

A pang of guilt stabbed Turbo in the stomach. Maybe he should never have brought it up, but he hadn’t realized that she’d react this way… "I'm sorry, Vanellope. I…I didn't know," he said, biting his lip. He couldn't think of anything else to say.

Vanellope straightened up and flashed him a tense smile. "I-it's okay, Pajama Boy. There was no way you could have known." She tilted up her chin. "And besides, we don't have to worry about him anymore. King Candy is gone forever."

 _King Candy_ …

Turbo glitched involuntarily, and he could have sworn that he heard someone whisper in his ear briefly. " _Remember, remember…you're starting to remember…hoo-hoo-hoo…_ "

Blinking off the eerie auditory hallucination, he piped up with, "If it makes you feel any better, I know what it's like to be out on your own like that. I've never exactly been mister popularity."

"Yeah, you mentioned that before. But…I’m still not sure I get it." She shifted, crossing her legs beneath her and poking a hoodie string into her mouth. “Didn’t Turbo Time used to be the most popular game in the arcade?"

"Oh, sure, the gamers really liked us a lot. But the other characters in the arcade…not so much." He folded his arms in his lap, watching the cotton candy clouds drift languidly in the sky overhead. " I guess Jet and Set had an okay time, but me…I dunno. Something was _off_ about me."

“You mean, with the way you look?”

“That was part of it, but it wasn’t the main thing. It was like…I couldn’t make myself understood, and I also couldn’t understand anybody. I _thought_ I could, but then I realized that the whole time I thought people were being nice to me, they were actually just mocking me. By the time I figured it out, it was too late, I would be known as the weird obnoxious kid forever.” He snorted. “You know what’s really pathetic? I _still_ can’t figure out what I was doing wrong back then.”

“Maybe you bragged a lot,” suggested Vanellope.

“Maybe. I _did_ like to talk about all the races I won, but I wasn’t _trying_ to brag, not at first. I was just excited. I guess I talked too much, but I couldn’t tell if people wanted to hear it or not. I can’t ever tell what anybody’s thinking.”

That intrigued her. “Really? So you can’t tell what I’m thinking?”

“Not by looking at your face.” He rolled his eyes in mock exasperation, then winked. “But you’re pretty good about letting me know.”

She snickered.

“Anyway, they were already making fun of me, but then new games started getting plugged in and I started looking real creepy. And you know how it is once people decide _one_ thing about you is weird – all of a sudden, everything you do is hilarious.”

“You’re tellin’ me.”

“They started calling me ghost boy, and that’s when I decided that I couldn’t ever be friends with anybody, so I stopped trying. I was kind of by myself after that.” A sigh breezed through his lips, and he shut his eyes wistfully. "I think that's why I liked racing so much, or rather, liked winning so much. Not just because I was the lead character and I was supposed to want to race and win, but because when somebody was playing my game and they won…and I got to stand up on the podium holding my trophy while they high fived each other and talked about how great Turbo Time was…well, that's the only time that I ever felt like I was really  _worth_  something."

Vanellope was tilting her head at him thoughtfully. "I think I know that feeling," she said. "And it's the best feeling in the world. But there are other ways to get it besides winning, Turbo."

"Oh, really? Like what?"

She slipped off of her gumdrop and approached him with an uncharacteristically serious expression on her face. "Like having a family. I haven't had a family for very long, but now that I do, I  _always_  feel like I'm worth something. I don't have to win every race, I just have to know that they're there, watching me and supporting me…and loving me."

"Well, that's great for you, glitter-graphics." He averted his eyes. "But I don't have a family. Never have."

"Maybe not, but at least now, you’ve got a friend."

"Who?"

Pudgy little fingers entwined around his hand and squeezed. "Me, g- _doy_ ," she declared, and smiled.

* * *

 

Turbo contemplated that concept a lot during the evening.  _Family_.

He thought about it after dinner, as he watched Ralph and Vanellope fooling around in the throne room. Ralph had scooped the girl into his massive hands and was now tossing her lightly into the air, his face becoming softer and kinder as he listened to her giggles and screeches. "Higher!" she yelled.

"Higher?" repeated Ralph, arching one bushy eyebrow. "Okay, how's this?" He threw her again, and her ponytail bounced high above her head.

She was screaming with laughter now. "Is that seriously the best you can do?! I thought you were supposed to be strong! Throw me _higher_!"

"Still not good enough for you, kid?! Okay, how's this?" This time she went soaring so high that the top of her head brushed against the ceiling.

Felix gaped at the scene with his hands clasped over his heart. "Oh my land! Ralph, please be careful!"

"Aw, we'll be fine, Felix," replied Ralph dismissively. "You know that I'd never let anything happen to her." As if to confirm his words, Vanellope dropped gently into his outstretched palms, still giggling hysterically.

"Even still…" Felix wiped some of the concern from his face as he turned to Turbo, who was looking on to the scene silently. "Er, Turbo, we're going to go to Tapper's for a little while tonight. I would invite you to come with us, but…"

"I know, I know," Turbo sighed. "Glitches can't leave their games. You don't have to remind me."

Vanellope teleported out of Ralph's hands and gazed up at the estranged racer, puckering her lips sympathetically. "Sorry about that, Pajama Boy. We'll bring you back a root beer if you want!"

"No thanks," he answered, shrugging apathetically. “I’ve never really liked root beer.” Besides, what was another night of crocheting alone in his bedroom when that was pretty much how he spent every day?

But on this night, after Ralph and Felix and Calhoun and Vanellope had headed out, the atmosphere of the castle felt somehow more desolate than usual. It wasn't as if he was the only one home, of course. There were guards and servants scurrying about and doing their work more or less unseen, not to mention Sour Bill. But they might as well have been extra furniture for all they interacted with Turbo, and through the somber silence, one word looped endlessly in his head.

Family.

He had been envious of the fact that Vanellope had one pretty much from the very start, but it was stunning to know that it was a relatively recent development for her. She seemed so comfortable with Ralph, Felix, and Calhoun – how could anyone have guessed that she hadn't known them for her entire life? And she, too, had once been a kid out on her own… _wait, no,_  he reminded himself.  _I'm not a kid_.

Hours later, just as he was about to consider getting ready for bed, the door to his room was thrown open without warning. Turbo glitched from the shock and got to his feet. "Glitter-graphics!" he exclaimed, setting his still-unfinished scarf aside. "You startled me."

"Sorry 'bout that. I have something for you." Vanellope zipped over to his bed in a fizz of azure pixels, flat holding a rectangular object out to him that was certainly not a root beer. "See, when we were at Tapper's, Sarge dropped her Cy-Bug tracker, and Tapper said it was at the Lost and Found, so I went to go pick it up. While I was there, I saw this picture shoved in the back of the closet."

Turbo lifted the picture from her hands, brow furrowed. When he saw what it was a picture of, he glitched so strongly that he nearly sent it fluttering to the floor.

The picture was a photograph of him, looking as creepy as ever, except that his customary lopsided grin and dark-rimmed eyes radiated such utter joy that made him wonder how he ever could have been so happy. But that wasn't all. He had been captured sitting between two blue-clad, brightly smiling figures of about his same stature: Jet and Set. The photographer had apparently caught them in the middle of laughing together, and they’d just barely lifted their eyes towards the camera, hardly aware that this moment was about to be preserved in grainy 1980’s color…

"I remember this," Turbo breathed. "It was from the grand opening of Tapper’s, when it first got plugged in. Tapper was taking pictures of everybody who came in…"

Vanellope nodded slowly. "He told me that. He said he keeps all those pictures in an album, but not this one because too many bad memories. I mean, um…you know, you’re supposed to be dead and everything." Her pupils flitted back and forth nervously. "But he didn’t want to just throw it out, so…"

Turbo might have taken more note of the slip-up had he not been so concentrated on the photo. He could just picture Jet and Set stepping off of the paper wearing their identical goofy smiles, patting him on the back and remarking, "Long time no see, buddy." It occurred to him that this was probably the last surviving likeness of them that he even owned, one of the only pieces of evidence that Turbo Time had ever existed…

"You miss them, don't you?" murmured Vanellope, staring up at him mournfully.

He nodded wordlessly. Yes, he missed Jet and Set so much that sometimes it was like a hollow ache at the base of his ribcage. He couldn't think of anything more to say. If he'd ever had something close to a family, then those two had been it, hands down. And how had he showed his appreciation towards them? By constantly acting like a jerk, taunting their losses, and snapping at them that nobody ever won anything by being nice.

Something warm and cuddly attached itself to his chest, and he looked down in surprise. Vanellope had wrapped her arms around him, the top of her head coming up to just below his chin. Her lips curled into a slight, well-intentioned smirk when she saw his aghast expression. "What's with the face, Pajama Boy? Haven't you ever gotten a hug before?"

"No," he said, eyes wide as he frantically tried to formulate the proper response to such a display of affection. Aside from friendly pats on the back from Jet and Set, he’d hardly even been touched before. Still, he had to admit that it was sort of nice…soothing, and comforting…"I never have."

"Oh. Well." She took a step back, smiling sheepishly, and not showing any inclination to tease him for his inexperience. "I guess there's a first time for everything."


	9. Living dreams and living nightmares

" _Kid, we need to talk."_

" _Okay, gimme one second…"_

" _No, not in one second. Now."_

"Mmm…" Turbo rubbed a hand across his eyes sleepily, his head a dead weight as it shifted against the pillow. He had unintentionally dozed off after a series of particularly terrifying dreams had deprived him of sleep the night before, and now was only able to open his eyes with great difficulty; afternoon naps were always the hardest to awaken from. He couldn't help but consider drifting off again, before he remembered the conversation taking place outside his bedroom door that had awakened him in the first place.

" _What's going on, Stinkbrain?"_

" _What are you doing this afternoon?"_

" _I'm going to the Cakeway with Turbo for glitch lessons, just like always. Why?"_

" _Because that's exactly what we need to talk about."_

He propped himself up on his elbows, the sponge cake mattress depressing beneath him. "Vanellope?" he mumbled, still half-asleep. It sounded as if she and Ralph were talking out in the corridor…and judging by Ralph's tone, the wrecker was far from happy.

" _Back when we first reset Turbo, we talked about this. Me and Felix and Calhoun told you that you had to be careful with him, remember?"_

" _Yeah, I remember."_

" _Uh, clearly you don't, because you have been getting way too comfortable with him lately. And I'm not gonna lie, kid, it's a little concerning."_

" _Oh, come on, Ralphie! Don't be such a worrywart! Me and Turbo just do our glitch training and then play around a little afterwards, what's so bad about that?"_

" _You're acting like you and him have been bestest friends forever, and to me, it's starting to look like you've completely forgotten what he did!"_

" _Um, no. No, I haven't."_ Judging by the sudden coldness of her voice, Vanellope's emotions seemed to have pivoted one hundred and eighty degrees, and Turbo could just picture the scowl that her lips would be puckering into. " _You know I could never forget about that."_

" _Then why have you been acting like everything is just peachy?!"_

" _Well…"_

Turbo, now sitting fully upright, frowned quietly to himself. It was true and Vanellope had been spending a lot more of their free time together lately. Their glitch lessons always dissolved into leisurely races sooner or later, and Vanellope had taken to playfully wrestling and roughhousing with him when they returned home each day, tackling him to the floor and giggling as she declared, "Now's your chance, Pajama Boy! Use your glitch, just like I taught you!" And sometimes the two of them would simply sit and relax with one another after a long day of work and play, glugging down glasses of milk and chattering happily about how much they loved racing, funny things that had happened to them in the past, the worst crashes they'd ever been involved in, and all kinds of other stuff. So yes, they'd been noticeably friendlier with one another lately…but was Ralph really saying that it was a  _bad_  thing? It wasn't as if Vanellope never hung out with her other friends, and judging by the amount of time she spent on Ralph's shoulder, he was her transportation method of choice! So why…?

" _He's not bad, Ralphie, honestly he's not. He's a lot like I was! All he wants to do is get control of his glitch and be a real racer, and besides…in a weird way, he's actually kind of sweet."_

" _Sweet?!"_ The word reverberated incredulously, so thunderously loud that everyone in the castle must have heard it. " _Kid, have you lost your mind?!"_

" _No! Why don't you want to give him a chance?! I like him, Felix likes him, even Sarge isn't as mean to him as you are! And that's saying something for her!"_

" _How am I supposed to forget about what he – "_

" _Ladies, keep your voices down!"_ That sharp, militaristic bark belonged to Sergeant Calhoun, who interjected the argument out of nowhere. " _Honestly, do you have to discuss this right here?"_

Nothing else was said after that, but the thuds of heavy footsteps stomping down the hall informed Turbo that Ralph had stormed off. The racer remained perfectly still for a while, puzzled and blinking, still two-fifths asleep. It was several long moments before he began to wonder if he had dreamed what he'd overheard, or misinterpreted it due to his drowsy state.

The door to his bedroom creaked open, and a rosy-cheeked face ringed by candy-coated black bangs peered in at him somberly. "Heya, Pajama Boy," Vanellope greeted him. "Did you…did you hear any of that?"

"Hear what?" asked Turbo, hoping that a nervous glitch wouldn't reveal his little fib. "I was taking a nap. I just woke up."

"Oh. Well then!" She perked right up, unmistakable relief seeping through to her expression. "Sleepin' on the job? Shame on you!"

"I didn't sleep well last night, okay, glitter-graphics?" He swung his legs over the side of the bed and rolled his shoulders, which more or less evaporated the last of the fogginess in his brain.

"More nightmares, huh?"

"Yeah. How did you know?"

"I heard you scream again."

"Oh." Betrayed by his ever-restless mind for the umpteenth time…he winced, and scarlet binary crackled against his torso. Just another very minor glitch. "Sorry about that. I can't help it."

"I know you can't. Anyway, are you gonna get your butt up and come to glitch lessons with me, or are you just gonna sit there?"

He considered it. "Sit here," he answered, as about half of him strongly desired more time to puzzle over the harsh statements he'd overheard.

The other, more nervous half, however, was secretly relieved when Vanellope decided that he was joking and tugged him off of the bed with a bouncy little snicker. He was beginning to think that he shouldn't spend very much time wondering about what the others were hiding from him. He might not like what he discovered about them…or about himself.

* * *

 

Turbo could hardly believe that he had been in Sugar Rush for nearly an entire month already, and it was even more surprising that he had somehow managed to fall into a routine. He had to admit that it wasn't so bad, training to control his weakened code and fooling around with Vanellope. Oh, of course he was burdened by the ever-present elephant in the room of not being able to leave the game, and the twins' absence still felt like a gaping hole in the center of his life, but he was…content. He was getting closer to racing again, nobody was calling him a ghost boy, and he knew that there was at least one person in the world who actually cared about him.

Vanellope had been showing him some more advanced glitching techniques lately – namely, how to use the malfunction for short-term teleportation. It was actually quite difficult. Eventually, Turbo found that if he drew in a deep breath and concentrated with every fiber of his being, he could make himself glitch and reappear a few inches or feet away, but this ability had one troubling side effect. He could only do it three or four times in a row before it caused him to feel dizzy and sick. He had even fainted on more than one occasion when he'd "glitched himself out."

At first, Vanellope had thought that this was a temporary hindrance that would subside over time, but it had hardly gotten any better over the course of their lessons. It looked as if Turbo wouldn't ever be able to speed-glitch as freely as she did. Still, he at least had something to show for his efforts, and maybe it would even turn out to be a useful skill if he could ever get the hang of using it on the track.

"Come on, Pajama Boy, try again," coaxed Vanellope, who was standing on top of a large jawbreaker at the side of the Cakeway. "Glitch yourself right next to me. Just focus…and concentrate…and..."

Turbo squeezed his eyes shut, sucked in a lungful of air, and forced himself to dissolve into a flurry of crimson binary. A second later, his body reassembled at the base of the jawbreaker. He opened his eyes and glanced around, admittedly disappointed when he confirmed his new location. "I almost got it that time."

"One more time! You were so close!" she exclaimed. She was a fan of affectionate insults, but when it came to glitch training, she seemed to always feel the need to be strenuously encouraging.

"Okay, okay. I can do this." He shifted his feet and inhaled a few cleansing breaths, trying to get into a more free-flowing state of mind…become one with the code, as it were. "I'm in control…in control…one, two, three – "

He glitched but remained stationary, and dizzy spots blossomed in front of his eyes. Turbo reeled and lowered himself into a sitting position on the ground, willing the nausea in his abdomen to retreat. "Um, I think it's time for a little break now."

"Yeah, you don't wanna tire yourself out, Pajama Boy." Vanellope hopped down from her perch and settled down beside him. "Don't worry, you  _are_  starting to get better. I can tell. You just need to start using that glitch control when you're racing, and maybe soon, you won't even glitch at all when you don’t want to!”

Suddenly, she snapped her fingers.

"…what is it?" he inquired.

“I just had an idea!” she proclaimed. “If you’re gonna be taking a break anyway, I wanna show you something. The place where I first learned to control my glitch!”

“What, you think it’s got magic that’s gonna rub off on me or somethin’?”

She rolled her eyes. “It will _inspire_ you. C’mon, let’s go. We’re not too far anyway!”

Turbo had expected her to hop into her kart, but instead, she bounded off into a thicket of lollipop scrubs. He had no choice but to follow her, carefully easing his way through the sticky branches while she glitched back and forth eagerly. After a walk of about five minutes, surely no more than ten, a shadow fell across them, and he realized that they’d come to Diet Cola Mountain.

Vanellope twirled around to face him, rubbing her hands together.

“What I’m gonna show you is a total secret, Pajama Boy. I’ve never shown it to anybody in my entire life! Ever! …well, except for Ralph.”

Turbo craned his neck curiously to gaze at two giant sugar-free lollipops, arching and intersecting above his and Vanellope’s heads. “What exactly is this place?”

“I told you, it’s a secret! Now close your eyes.”

He snorted in annoyance, but obliged.

“I’m gonna grab on to ya, okay?” A moment later, her fingers closed around the sleeve of his jumpsuit. “Now follow me. Just keeping walking forward…”

He stumbled along after her insistent tugging. Even though his eyes were scrunched shut, he was able to detect an abrupt change in the lighting when darkness seemingly enveloped him…which was odd, because there were no caves or crevices that he’d seen around Diet Cola Mountain, not even any foliage that really provided a lot of shade. However, he didn’t actually start feeling alarmed until a thunderous boom echoed all around him.

His eyes flew open, glowing dim and yellow, although even that didn’t help him see exactly where he was. “What was that?!”

“Chill out, headlights.” Vanellope let go of him and placed her hands on her hips. “It was only the cola.”

“…Cola?”

With an impish grin, she scampered forward, leaving Turbo to scramble after her with steps that were significantly less speedy and significantly more unsure.

Slowly, his surroundings seemed to solidify around him; he was in a cavern constructed of marbled fudge and peanut brittle, with a low ceiling and sloping walls. It felt cramped, even to someone with his tiny stature. However, as he walked onwards, the environment opened up around him quite rapidly to reveal a bubbling orange lake, with white candy formations dangling above it from a point so high up that it was invisible to him.

“Ta-da!” Vanellope spread her arms wide. “Welcome to the secret bonus level!”

He frowned. “…secret bonus level?”

“Well, okay, it’s not really a bonus level, but it was gonna be! And it’s definitely a secret! Only super extra-special cool people get to see it, so consider yourself lucky.”

Turbo couldn’t help but smile at that. He’d only known Vanellope for a month, and already it was hard to remember a time when they hadn’t been on friendly terms.

His smile only lasted until a fragment of the white candy formations broke off and tumbled into the steaming liquid below. At the impact, a geyser spurted up, accompanied by a rather violent noise.

A fragment of…something…overtook Turbo’s memory for half a second.

_“You fools! Why are you going into the li – oh…”_

When a splatter of cola splashed and sizzled on the ground near his feet, he was jolted back to reality.

“Those are Mentos,” Vanellope was explaining. “They fall in the cola and make it a'splode. So you gotta watch out, ‘cause that stuff is hot enough to burn your pajama brains!”

He was still too shaken to come up with a response to her playful insult. “…how do you know about this place?”

Vanellope blinked, but otherwise showed no sign that his question had fazed her. “I used to live here. It was the only place I could go to be safe, back when…you know…”

“…when you were an outcast?” he finished uncomfortably. “And King Candy was around?”

“Yeah.”

Another Mentos hit the cola.

“ _Ohh…ohhhh…no – yes – n-no –_ ”

“Over there was where my bed used to be. I had a bunch of stuff. Like some candy wrappers for blankets. When I go to bed, I still like to bundle myself up like a little homeless lady. Oh, and I had a doll that I made of – 'Bo, are you listenin’ to me?!”

Turbo glitched. “W-wha – oh, I’m sorry, Vanny. I just…zoned out for a sec.”

She stared at him for a long moment, but there was more concern in her expression than annoyance…uncharacteristically so.

“Anyway, like I was sayin’, I used to have all that stuff. But then the mountain blew its top, and when the game reset we all got our memories back, I guess it musta gotten wiped out – ”

BOOM. Another eruption.

“ _No – yes – NO, YES, NO – GO INTO THE LIIIIIIAAAAAAGH – !_ ”

Turbo glitched again and reeled back as Vanellope snapped her fingers in his face.

“Helloooo! Earth to Turbo! What the heck is the matter with you!”

“I…” He breathed out. The hallucinated imagery had gone away now, but he could have sworn that a too-familiar voice barely brushed a whisper beside his ear…

_Remember, remember, remember…_

“…can we go, please, Vanellope? I’m sorry. But this place really gives me the creeps.”

* * *

 

The lemon-drop sunlight was harsh on his eyes when he first emerged from the darkness, but welcome nonetheless. Almost as soon as they left the mountain, tension leaked out of him and evaporated, until the strange experience of standing by the hot spring had left only faint traces in his memory like sugar dissolved in tea.

“Well, I guess that was a bust,” admitted Vanellope. “But don’t worry, I know something else we can do! Except we’ll have to wait until tomorrow, it’s almost dinnertime now…”

Turbo could see no difference in the position of the sun, but he supposed that once you’d lived here long enough, you developed an instinctive sense of what time of day it was. “Okay. So what’ll we do tomorrow?”

She tapped a finger against her chin thoughtfully, then announced, “Here's the plan. Instead of me coming home to get you for glitch training like usual, you're gonna go with Ralph to the Random Roster Race, okay? Don't bring your car, just walk. It's not that far. You can watch me from behind the stands as long as you keep yourself outta sight, and when I'm finished, I'll have a special surprise for you! Got it?"

"What kind of surprise?" asked Turbo.

She rolled her eyes. "If I told you that, then it wouldn't be a surprise, g- _doy_. But that's for tomorrow. For now…" She grinned hugely. "Think fast, Pajama Boy!" With that, she pounced on him as gleefully as a kitten, tackling him to the ground.

"Oh no you don't!" He squirmed, thrashing around as he tried to buck her off, but her skillful teleportation kept her clinging to him. "I'm already dirty as it is!"

"It's okay, we can wash those pajamas!" Her hands plunged into his armpits, fingers wriggling rapidly.

"For the last time, they're not pajamas! This is my – " His yellow eyes went wide, and clamped his mouth shut to restrain the uncontrollable laughter welling up in his stomach, which worked for about three seconds. "BAHAHAHAHAHAHA!"

How in the world had she known that he was ticklish?!

"Muahahahaha!" she cackled evilly, increasing the speed and ferocity of her tickling. "Let's answer an age old question! Do you glitch when you're tickled?!"

"Ye-he-he-HE-HES! I DO! I DO!" screamed Turbo, the only words he was able to get out before his voice was completely overwhelmed by laughter again, and sure enough, violent glitches were breaking out all along his body.

"Then I'll have to remember that for later!" She threw back her head and gave a triumphant guffaw. "Now I know your weakness!"

They were both absolutely filthy by the time they got home, but Felix was used to that by now.

* * *

 

It was only later, when he was lying awake in bed and staring up at the frosting-coated ceiling of his room, that Turbo recalled the unsettling argument between Ralph and Vanellope. And as if that had opened the floodgates, the memories of Diet Cola Mountain exploded to the forefront of his mind, along with all the strange images and sounds that had assailed him there. It was like…well, come to think of it, it was just like the voice that he’d half-heard whispering beside his ear before, sometimes during the day but most often when he was drifting off to sleep at night: _remember, remember, remember…_

What was he supposed to remember?

_Well, that’s a stupid question. The only thing I CAN’T remember is those thirty years between Turbo Time and now._

But he’d been catatonic during all that time, hadn’t he?

_That’s what they told you. But what if they’re lying?_

He swallowed hard, doubt settling over him like a layer of pond scum. These people were keeping something from him – Ralph, Sergeant Calhoun, Felix, and even Vanellope all knew something that he didn't, and they were trying to keep him from finding out. He had known it from the very start, and he’d never been more certain of it than he was now.

 _Something is very wrong here_.

He slipped out of bed and padded down the hallway, not even realizing what he was about to do until he had already knocked on the door to Felix's room, and by then it was too late to take it back.

"Oh, Turbo!" said the handyman in surprise upon answering the soft rapping. He was dressed in a pair of pale blue button-down pajamas with a monogrammed pocket, and the ever-present FF cap was missing from his head. Calhoun was visible just behind him, wearing gray sweatpants and a threadbare white T-shirt. "What are you doing up so late, kiddo? Is something wrong?"

Turbo fidgeted with his fingers, too preoccupied to recite his usual "I'm not a kid" mantra. "Felix, I wanted to ask you a question," he said softly.

"Oh? Ask away, then."

Turbo's tongue seemed to have frozen in place.  _Go ahead,_ he prompted himself.  _Start asking. There's so many questions that you could begin with. Like, why have you been hiding me away in the castle and not letting anyone else catch a glimpse of me?_

_Why can't I remember the past thirty years of my life? Why is there such a sudden cutoff in my memories?_

_How come I've been having nightmares about the evil king who used to rule Sugar Rush before I ever got here?_

_What are you all hiding from me?_

But he couldn't do it. Trepidation was weighing heavily on his heart, and he realized that he wasn't willing to sacrifice the menial little bit of happiness that he did have in order to get at the truth. The truth wasn't necessarily going to make things any better or set his mind at ease. Maybe it was better to stay contented and ignorant.

 _If the nightmare died, the dream was dead, too._  Where had he heard that before?

So the only question to pass his lips was, "Why don't you like me?"

"What?!" Felix gaped, placing a hand over his chest. "Turbo, that's…is that really the impression you've been getting, that we don't like you?!"

Turbo lowered his eyes. "Well…I just feel like…"

"I know that we aren’t around much on work days…and boy do I know that Ralph can be a little gruff sometimes…but we care about you!" Felix slipped his hand around Turbo's shoulder and squeezed reassuringly. "We all do. Listen, I know how hard it's been for you to make the transition into this game, and I know that you got frustrated at the start, but you pulled through it! And we're very proud of you. I don't want you to think otherwise."

Calhoun leaned against the doorway, her acute features softening a fraction. "You're kind of a strange kid, Turbo, but not a bad one. And you've done well since you've been here."

"I…I'm not a kid," Turbo mumbled self-consciously. His cheeks felt funny, and he was thankful that he wasn't able to visibly blush.

Felix chuckled. "Sure you're not. Go get some sleep, Turbo. Vanellope tells me that you've got a big day ahead of you tomorrow."

"O…okay." A brief glitch overtook Turbo as he turned around, and he glanced over his shoulder, feeling ashamed and frustrated with himself.

Felix smiled gently. "Good night. You're going to be a great racer, and we all know it."

"Thanks…night, Ms. Calhoun. Night, Felix…"

Turbo trudged back towards what was bound to be another night of troubled sleep, cursing himself for being such a coward, for allowing his moment of vulnerability to get to him. He was no weakling. He wasn't a wimp, he wasn't a coward, and most of all he wasn't a kid…but he wanted to be, and that was what stung him.

His desire to act his own age was stronger than anything, even outweighing his wish to race again. He wanted to be like Vanellope, to have a family who would look after him and care for him and never ever leave him, to be able to fool around and be immature without having to prove himself to anybody…and most of all, he wanted to be able to go home in the evenings and know that no matter how his day had been, no matter how bad or good things had gone, he was loved and always would be. No more paranoia, no more abandonment if the gamers began to turn him a blind eye. A home and a family, that was all he really wanted.

Maybe that was all he'd ever wanted, and he'd just been looking for attention to satisfy a need that he had never been able to identify. Maybe tomorrow, he would gather up the courage to ask Felix about what he didn't know. Maybe…maybe…


	10. Flip of a coin

_He was racing, finally racing again, zooming through Sugar Rush on the most amazing course he’d ever seen. There were villages and canyons and even a giant birthday cake, and he was having so much fun that he found himself laughing aloud. How could he ever have doubted that he belonged here? This was so much better than Turbo Time._

_Now he was in a mountain range made of ice cream, and there was Vanellope beside him, smirking as she zipped ahead. He had to catch up! Luckily, he’d been here for so long that he knew all the secrets, and he swerved onto a shortcut that conveniently appeared before him. There weren’t any rails on this section of the track, but that was all right. His was far too skilled to take a nosedive off the edge, and even if the unthinkable happened, he couldn’t die here. This was his game now._

_Soon enough, the shortcut rejoined with the main track, but he landed badly and ended up colliding with Vanellope’s kart. Why had he done something so stupid? Now she was angry, of course, he’d be angry too if someone had jumped on top of his vehicle like that, but somehow they were still moving, and he’d grabbed something and was hitting her windshield, hitting_ her _, and why was he doing this, why was he trying to hurt her?! Her mouth was open, she was screaming something, then her car was sideways and he was forcing it forward to strike a pillar – no, Vanellope, I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m doing this, you’ve got to get away! Fortunately she did, glitching at the last moment, but he had no time to feel relieved because he still didn’t understand and he couldn’t stop and WHAT WAS THAT THING COMING TOWARDS HIM DOWN THE TUNNEL –_

"Kid, what are you screaming about?!"

Turbo shrieked again, terror tapering off into surprise, as his eyes finally began to observe the room around him again. He was glitching so badly that many parts of him had completely deliquesced into static and strings of 1s and 0s, and his hands were clamped over his head, as if blindly clawing at something inside. He exhaled shakily, flinching when his breath came out as a terrified half-sob, and lowered his arms. "O-oh…oh…"

Ralph was watching him with a quizzically arched eyebrow, leaning in the bedroom doorway…which, for the wrecker, meant that he had stuck his head and one beefy arm through the door. "Turbo, what's all the yelling about?" he repeated. Even his gruff face was a sight for Turbo's sore eyes right now.

"It was just a nightmare," Turbo gasped, saying it to himself as much as to Ralph. "J-just a stupid dream…oh…"

"…yeah, I figured that much." Ralph cleared his throat, still observing the racer uncertainly. "Do you always make so much noise when you have a nightmare?"

"I can't help it!" snapped Turbo, scowling. "It was…it was so awful! At first I was just racing, but then…!” He was losing the fervor that had made the dream so horrifying, and he frowned with an emotion that was almost confusion. After all, what was there to be afraid of? He was here in Sugar Rush, his new home. He could drive almost as well as before and was making good progress with controlling his glitch. He’d settled down for an afternoon nap not too long ago, though he’d almost been too excited to fall asleep, because…

Oh, right! The Random Roster Race – Vanellope’s surprise! That must have been why Ralph was here. But Turbo could have sworn that when he dozed off, it hadn’t been anywhere close to closing time.

"Take it easy, kid," said Ralph. The words weren't exactly dripping with love and comfort, but they weren't particularly cruel, either. "It wasn't real. It doesn't mean anything. Now get your behind out of bed and start getting ready, 'cause Vanellope will kill you if you're late to the Random Roster Race."

"That's right…" Turbo forced the last fragments of the dream out of his mind, focusing instead on Vanellope and their plans for the day ahead. He noticed that he was still fizzling with glitches, and silently chanting to himself that he was in control, he sucked in a few deep breaths and pushed the malfunctions into submission.  _Vanellope would never stop teasing me if she saw me like this,_ he thought.

Then he glanced up at Ralph again, brows quirking upwards in surprise. “Wait, I’ve been sleeping for almost three hours!”

"Well, that's not my fault, is it? I guess you really are a teenager."

* * *

 

Things actually did begin to look up that afternoon, starting with the Random Roster Race.

Turbo had never seen this event up-close before, and he had to admit that for a regular daily race, it was pretty spectacular. All fifteen Sugar Rush avatars, each themed after a different type of confection, rolled their karts up to the starting line of the Royal Raceway. Then they gathered around what appeared to be a tall popcorn box overlooking the track. His view wasn't entirely complete from where he was lurking behind the candy-box bleachers, but the important thing (or so Ralph had told him when the two of them had come down here) was that the jumbotrons were directly in his line of vision. If he could see the screens, then he'd be able to watch the race.

Vanellope stood at the top of the popcorn box, making announcements to the citizens of her game. Though she often referred to herself as the president, he’d never really given a second thought to that before, and he hadn’t exactly considered her an authority figure – until now, when she seemed to slip effortlessly into the role of the spunky, competent leader of Sugar Rush. She spoke about various parties and public events that would be taking place over the next few days, and then explained the rules of entry to the Random Roster Race, including the gold coin system. "This event is pay-to-play!" she shouted.

 _We all know this_ , Turbo thought to himself, and then he frowned, his brow furrowed. How  _did_  he know that? He dismissed the eeriness that washed over him, sure that Vanellope must have just mentioned it to him at some point.

 _Remember, remember,_  whispered a persistent voice in his head, but the crowd was so rambunctious that he hardly heard it.

Next, the racers all lined up to toss their golden coins into the winner's cup, which was balanced atop the starting line. "VANELLOPE VON SCHWEETZ!" shouted the announcer, as the little girl's name and picture appeared at the top of the board. She was quickly followed by, "TAFFYTA MUTTONFUDGE! MINTY ZAKI! ADORABEEZLE WINTERPOP! SWIZZLE MALARKEY! RANCIS FLUGGERBUTTER!..."

He examined the racers curiously: there was a pink strawberry girl; another girl decked out in lime green; another bundled up in cutesy winter gear; a couple of boys who looked like a swizzle stick and a peanut butter cup, respectively. None of the avatars could have been much above nine years old. They preened themselves, waved to the crowds, suited up in their protective gear, and engaged in any other pre-race idiosyncratic rituals that they might have. Turbo contemplated how enjoyable it all seemed, and also how long-winded and overly complicated their names were.  _Gloyd Orangeboar, Crumbelina di Caramello,_ and even  _Vanellope von Schweetz_ were awfully complex for someone used to a roster consisting of "Jet, Set, and Turbo." The exception to these naming conventions was the last girl up on the board, Candlehead, whose name seemed ridiculously obvious by comparison.

Finally, the last of the enthusiastic children had hopped behind the wheels of their karts, and floating marshmallows – Turbo had to rub his eyes and squint in order to confirm that he was seeing things correctly, but yes, they were definitely floating marshmallows – swooped down with equipment clasped in their disembodied hands, preparing to begin the race.

"Is everybody ready?!" shrieked Vanellope gleefully from her kart, which was at the front and center position at the starting line.

The other racers brought their voices into a muddled chorus of, " _Yes!"_

"Are you  _sure_  you guys are ready?!"

"YES!" This time the response was made more deafening by the spectators joining in as well. Turbo even heard Ralph bellowing along from his spot in the "Assorted Fans" section.

"THEN LET THE RANDOM ROSTER RACE COMMENCE!"

3…2…1…the numbers materialized in the air and whooshed above the racers’ heads. One of the flying marshmallows held up a green traffic light, and with that, the racers were off – with the exception of the girl in winter gear, who accidentally stalled her vehicle and ended up slightly behind the others as she finally began moving down the track. Within seconds, all sixteen of them had vanished from sight.

Turbo crept along the side of the bleachers carefully, certain that no one would notice him; the crowd was far too focused on the race, after all. His eyes darted back and forth between the two large jumbotron screens mounted above the course. One of them listed every single racer's name and ranking, constantly rearranging and self-updating as the positions changed, while the other switched back and forth between various scenes unfolding on the track. Currently Vanellope was visible on the live feed, weaving between opponents as she exited Sugar Square and flew off of a ramp that deposited her into Gumball Gorge.

 _That looks dangerous_ , he thought to himself, his gaze tracking the paths of the giant gumballs as they collided head-on with several racers,  _but kind of exciting, too._  He wondered how soon he would be able to try it. So far the Royal Raceway was much more elaborate than Sweet Ride or the Cakeway had been, and certainly there was no point in even bothering to compare it to Turbo Time, but he was always willing to take a risk where racing was involved.

Vanellope was in third position by the time the avatars arrived at the next major section of the track, an enormous birthday cake. ( _Wait a minute – a town, a canyon, a birthday cake…isn’t that like…?_ He snapped his attention back to the race before his thoughts could wander any further.) On the screen, she was visibly laughing and joking with the two girls closest to her. "No cherry bombs today, eh Candlehead?" she snickered, her voice sounding tinny and faraway through the jumbotron speakers.

Out of nowhere, another kid – this one was the peanut butter cup boy, Rancis Fluggerbutter – rammed into the side of Vanellope's kart. Without even flinching, she flickered into blue static and rematerialized an instant later, now in second position. The crowd let out a delighted cheer at their president's resourcefulness, and Turbo clapped right along with them. "You're good, glitter-graphics," he said aloud, his voice promptly swallowed by the roaring citizens. "You're really good. But watch your back, because soon you won't be the only glitch racing out there!"

The next location was the Ice Cream Mountain Range, where the road laced through mounds of frozen treats, signs were posted warning the drivers of hot fudge and sprinkle avalanches, and powdered sugar flurried down from the sky instead of snow. Turbo’s arms tingled softly, not with a glitch, but with an actual chill. _I knew that the next place would be an ice cream mountain. But why did I know that?_

No time to think about it, because in another moment, the camera had switched to pursue the first place racer (Candlehead), and she had already entered a tunnel where the road glinted with sugar crystals, mottled with all the colors of the rainbow. The track dipped down at an almost completely vertical incline, and the children, not bothering to slow down, shrieked with a combination of joy and fright as if they were riding a roller coaster. Even watching it from a distance was giving Turbo an uneasy sensation of vertigo. He wasn't exactly afraid of heights, but he had to draw the line somewhere.

The race was now blurring into a frenzied rush of action as the children zoomed down the narrow road, past stalactites and other vaguely threatening rock formations, bumping and banging into one another all the way. Between the noise of their horns blaring and the crowd going absolutely bonkers, none of the snide quips that the racers tossed at each other were audible, but the spirit of friendly competition was alive and present nonetheless. As soon as they made it out of the caves, Turbo spotted them all speeding towards the finish line, raising clouds of cocoa dust. Every so often, there was a blazing blue flicker as Vanellope teleported here and there. The leaderboard was updating too frequently to keep up with.

And at last, they all sped past the finish line en masse, so forcefully that he could have sworn that he felt a gust of wind even from behind the stands.

The final rankings were: Candlehead in first, Adorabeezle Winterpop in second, Swizzle Malarkey in third, and Vanellope von Schweetz in fourth. Vanellope, seeming hardly bothered by her loss, congratulated each of the top nine racers for earning their spots on tomorrow's roster before handing the winner's cup to Candlehead. The green-haired little girl was overjoyed as she accepted the trophy, which was now filled to the brim with gleaming golden coins. "I was almost running out of tokens!" she squealed. "I can't remember the last time I got first place!"

Vanellope grinned and punched her on the shoulder playfully. "Well, hopefully that'll make you feel better when I whip-cream you tomorrow!" she cackled.

The little president blew kisses to her subjects only half-sarcastically, and she waved enthusiastically at Ralph, who flashed a thumbs-up from his place in the stands. Then a group of the other children, including bubbly hot-pink Taffyta (the strawberry girl) swarmed upon her like ants over a sugar cube. "Want to come to Tapper's with us, Vanellope?" asked Rancis Fluggerbutter.

"Yeah, we're having a victory celebration!" added Swizzle.

"No thanks, guys," Vanellope pardoned herself. "I mean, I'd like to, but I already made a promise to do something for somebody else today."

Taffyta smirked. "Oh, you’re going off with your mysterious _friend_ again? When do we get to meet him, anyway?"

"I already told ya, it’s none of your beeswax! But yeah, it does have to do with him. Catch you guys later!" With that, she skipped off towards her kart.

Turbo, who had at this point hidden himself more thoroughly again, flapped his hand at her a little so that she would see where he was.

Moments later, Vanellope had screeched her car to a halt beside him, and she was out and babbling at full speed before he could even say hello. "Didja see me, Pajama Boy?! Didja see me out there?!" she gushed. "It was so cool! I was zooming down the track, vroom vroom vroom, nothing was stoppin' me! And then Rancis tried to push me off the road, did you see that?! But I glitched away! Ooh, and how about when Taffyta got that power-up cube? She almost hit me with a sweet seeker! Man, it was so great – "

"Great?" interrupted Turbo quizzically. "But…you didn't win."

"No, I didn't." She bobbed her shoulders noncommittally. "Who cares? Sometimes I win and sometimes I don't. Really, the important thing is to get in the top nine and be on the roster for the next day." She bounced on her feet. "And I did do that!"

"Yup, you did," he agreed. "And it sure looked like you were having fun out there."

"I was! Oh, it's always so much fun! I love racing!" She grinned, flipping her ponytail in his direction. "I bet you'll have the time of your life once you get out there."

He smiled, envisioning himself taking part in the chaos that he had just witnessed. Nothing like he was used to, but certainly something to look forward to. "Definitely."

"Anyway, enough talk! It's time for your surprise!" Vanellope leapt into the driver's seat of her kart and patted the space behind her. "C'mon, hop on!"

"Wait, we have to drive to the surprise?!" Turbo groaned and dragged a hand along his face, stretching out the white skin of his cheek. "Listen, glitter-graphics, I am so over this riding on the back of your car thing."

"Shut up and get on," she ordered cheerfully. "You'll understand when we get there."

Stifling an irritated glitch, he rolled his eyes and hoisted himself atop the perch that he hadn't used since gaining enough control to properly drive. "Okay, let's go. Hey, is Ralph going to wonder where we are?"

"Nope. He knows exactly where we're going." She shifted into gear, her fingers pattering excitedly against the lollipop joystick. "Hold on tight!"

* * *

 

They bumped along semi-familiar pathways, and after about ten minutes of driving, Turbo realized that they were headed in the direction of the factory always crouching low on the horizon. His theory was confirmed when they approached a small guard booth placed at the side of the road, with a candy cane barricade jutting from its side to block their progress; inside it was an old man with a woolen cap pulled over his head and a bushy white beard, who was snoozing away contentedly and taking no notice of their arrival. Small, puffy white Z’s drifted above his head comically, popping like soap bubbles in a steady progression. He was the only other person that they had come across on their journey.

"Hey. HEY!" Vanellope shouted at him, cupping her hands around her mouth. "Hey, you! Beard Papa!"

The old man jerked awake, slapping his cheeks in an attempt to make himself more alert. "What?! Who goes there – oh, P-President von Schweetz!" he sputtered.

"What the heck do I pay you for?" she demanded irritably, drumming her fingers against her pretzel steering wheel in a telltale impatient manner.

"S-so sorry for the delay, Madame President!" He yanked on a lever within the booth, and the striped pole slid upwards to allow them passage. Turbo glanced over his shoulder as they picked up speed and noticed that the old man was staring at him uncomfortably.

Vanellope either didn't see this or was choosing not to acknowledge it, because she was humming contentedly as she drove down the trail towards the factory. She eventually parked in front of a large, sturdy door, adorned with a crown symbol – Turbo recognized the insignia from its various appearances around the castle, and also because it was engraved into every single golden racers' coin. As she clambered out of her car, she seemed to have lost all ability to hold herself still, and she skipped and pranced and even glitch-teleported herself all about as she excitedly explained the situation to him. "You're goin' up another level, Pajama Boy!" she announced. "Surprise – it's time to make you your very own kart!"

Turbo blinked, and a startled glitch rippled through him before he could even think to stop it. "I…I'm going to have my own car again? Really?!"

"Yes, really!" She grinned broadly, as if she was about to bestow upon him the key to the world…and he supposed that, in a way, she was.

He thought back on his generic kart, her pile of bakery scraps, and the various other themed vehicles that he had spotted at the racetrack earlier. "What kind of car do I get?"

"Whatever kind you want!" She was working on the door latches now, and after delivering a few swift yanks to the safety padlock, the entrance shrieked open with the grating sound of metal scraping against the ground. Behind it was a round room, draped with velvety red curtains, with a sequence of enormous gently glowing buttons set into the walls. Each one was emblazoned with a picture of a different type of racecar.

He was about to make his way into the room, but apparently he wasn't moving quickly enough for Vanellope, because she shoved him inside so forcefully that he was only able to keep his balance through sheer luck. "Pick one!" she commanded, opening her arms to gesture to the wide variety of karts available. "That one over there is mine." She proudly aimed her finger at an illustration of a vehicle that barely resembled her sloppy, icing-laden thing.

Turbo pressed his lips together in ponderance. "Ummm…hmm, let's see…" His yellow eyes, which pulsed with their own internal luminescence in the dim lighting of the selection room, swept back and forth thoughtfully. Suddenly, he caught sight of one with a sleek, narrow shape that reminded him of his car from Turbo Time – and even better, it was all red and white, apparently peppermint-themed. "How about this one?" He strode over, placed his palms against the button, and pressed down.

A panel in the wall slid upward, revealing a vast area behind it with an assembly line stretching out past his field of vision, and an announcer's voice boomed out of nowhere: "WELCOME TO THE BAKERY! LET'S BAKE A KART!"

"Minigame time!" sang out Vanellope, hopping like the sugar-fueled child that she was as her fingers sank into his arm. He found himself stumbling along behind her as she flounced towards the first station on the assembly line.

"YOU HAVE ONE MINUTE TO WIN IT! GO!"

Turbo frowned. "Wait, I have to make the car myself?! And – there's a time limit?!"

"Yeah, and the clock's already started!" she exclaimed. "Hurry up!"

"MIXING! PUT THE INGREDIENTS IN THE BOWL AND THROW AWAY THE TRASH!"

The sorting process actually wasn't too difficult. It was basically a tilting platform controlled by a steering wheel, and his reflexes were fairly acute, at least where steering wheels were concerned. Granted, he did slip up slightly and accidentally add a clock, a cardboard box, and a combination lock to his mixture, but everything else that ended up being spun into batter was definitely edible.

"Aww. I was never very good at that," pouted Vanellope.

He dashed to the next station. "C'mon, glitter-graphics, who's going slow now?! We've only got forty-five seconds left!"

"BAKING! PUMP UP THE HEAT AND KEEP THE PERFECT TEMPERATURE!"

This section involved a giant oven and a proportionally large tire pump, and it turned out to be much more problematic, since Turbo wasn't anywhere near tall enough to reach the handles. "I can't reach!" he cried, jumping up and down with his hands frantically wriggling in the air, but he didn't exactly have a platformer's hopping abilities.

"Here, let me help!" offered Vanellope, and she glitched herself atop his shoulders, where she struggled to press down on the pump. "Almost got it…almost…"

He was wobbling beneath her weight. "I can't hold you for much longer!"

"Oh, come on! I'm not that heavy!"

"You're not that much smaller than I am! I can't – "

 _Ding!_ The oven chirped at them, and Turbo's wobbly legs buckled. Fortunately, he barely even knocked his elbow in the fall, and Vanellope had teleported off of him before he hit the ground. They scrambled down the assembly line side-by-side.

"DECORATING!"

Turbo stationed himself at the blaster, standing on his tiptoes in order to get a good view of the glass tubes bolted to the wall. Frosting, sprinkles, cookie crumbs, and all manner of other garnishes extended in a line like a scrambled rainbow, and he immediately set about replicating the red-and-white theme that he’d seen on the kart in the picture, adding a few touches of his own. He took aim and methodically fired at four peppermint wheels, and then began laying down a thick layer of white icing as the bare bones of his future vehicle were pushed along beneath.

"Pajama Boy, your car is gonna look really boring!" declared Vanellope. "Don't you want any colors on it?"

"Trust me, I know what I'm doing!" he responded, adding a few pinches of red frosting to the mix. He only hoped that the final result would look the way that he was intending…

"TIME'S UP!"

The assembly line ended in a ramp, and the two of them darted over to it eagerly, now anticipating with equal enthusiasm what their one minute of frenzied work had produced. "CONGRATULATIONS, YOU DID IT, AND HERE'S YOUR KART!" praised the announcer, and down the ramp rolled…

…a go-kart in the very shape that Turbo had selected, primarily white but marbled with crimson stripes along the sides, lean and edgy and ready to tear up the road.

"Yay, it looks super cool!" giggled Vanellope, clapping her hands together. "What do you think, Pajama Boy?"

"It is pretty Turbo-Tastic, isn't it?" agreed Turbo, with a grin wide enough to reveal his yellow teeth. "But I think it's still…" He squinted as he gazed down the kart's mostly bare surface. "…missing something…"

He snapped his fingers as a sudden epiphany struck him. Over to one side of the factory was a shelf lined with piping bags, and he ran over to snatch one filled with red icing, before approaching his new car with a look of determination. It was time to make his mark on this thing.

Several minutes of squirting, spreading, and smearing later, he had accomplished his goal: a large red T was now glazed across the hood of the kart. He took a step back and smiled, dusting off his hands. "There. Now, it's perfect," he said, satisfied with his handiwork. But when this failed to elicit a response, he glanced over his shoulder with a slight frown. "Um, Vanellope?"

The garage-style sliding door at the end of the factory suddenly went up, and before there was more than a sliver of a gap between the bottom of the door and the ground, Vanellope had come charging inside in her own kart. She had placed her hot-pink goggles over her face again, but they did nothing to conceal her challenging smirk. "Well, Pajama Boy, are you just gonna stand there like a moron, or are you actually gonna drive that thing?"

Turbo blinked…then a delighted smile spread across his pale face, and his hand plunged into his jumpsuit pocket, grateful that he always kept his goggles on him nowadays.

"Race you back to the castle!" she proclaimed.

He secured the black goggles over his helmet and stuck his thumb up at her, copying his primary victory gesture from Turbo Time. "You are so on!"

* * *

 

Ten minutes later, he was barreling down the road at full speed while simultaneously grinning like an idiot. He liked this new car…no, he  _loved_  this new car. It was markedly faster than the generic vehicle that he had been using until now, and the buzz of its fresh-from-the-bakery engine ignited the most basic, shining kind of happiness within his very core. But perhaps more than that, it truly felt like something that was his and his alone, and it was something that any racer should possess: a racecar. He let out a spontaneous whoop of joy as he and Vanellope sped down the checkered pathway to her castle.

Vanellope, who was just ahead of him, peeked at her rearview mirror and laughed when she spotted the expression of ecstatic bliss on his face. "Having fun?"

"You bet I am!" he shouted, swerving in an attempt to get ahead of her, but she matched his movements and remained in front. He furrowed his brow in concentration. The day had been full of new things thus far, so maybe it was time to take yet another risk…he sucked in a deep breath, focused hard, and glitched.

She yelped with surprise when his car suddenly appeared on the road in front of her, materializing in a glittering fizzle of red pixels. Turbo, blinking as the glitch ended, returned to reality quickly enough that he didn't lose control of his vehicle. "I…I did it," he said aloud, and the wonder in his voice faded as he fully realized it. "Yes! YES! I did it! I did it! I used my glitch to get ahead! I FINALLY DID IT!"

Vanellope cheered at that, but was unable to keep from laughing at his reaction. "All right, Pajama Boy! Way to go!"

Turbo braked just in front of the royal garage, leapt out of his kart, and practically started dancing, he was so giddy at the perfection of the situation.  _Finally_ , things were starting to go right for him! He had his own car again, his glitch was helping him rather than hurting him, and now he even had something that he'd never had before – a friend, a good friend, a  _best_  friend. It was safe to say that he never would have gotten this far if it hadn't been for Vanellope, and he felt no shame in admitting that now. After all, there was nothing wrong with getting help from someone who truly cared about him…and who he cared about just as much, if not more.

Vanellope smirked as she pulled up alongside him, flicking her bangs away from her eyes. "I guess you won that one."

"Turbo-Tastic!" he exclaimed, pumping a fist into the air, and she snickered.

"Hey, I almost forgot." She reached under her seat, rummaging around for something. "I have another present for you." She produced a round, flat, shiny object, about the size of a dinner plate, and tossed it to him Frisbee-style. Turbo plucked it out of the air with some confusion, turning it around in his hands. It was…

"A gold coin?" he asked.

"Yup. You're gonna need it when you enter the Random Roster Race tomorrow!"

Turbo gasped. "The…the Random Roster Race?! Y-you really think I'm ready for that?!"

"Hey, you just used your glitch to win a race against me, and I'm the best there is!" She puffed out her chest proudly. "I think it's safe to say that you're ready for the track. You're in control now, Pajama Boy. Congrats!"

"Oh, Turbo-Tastic!" he repeated, hugging the gold coin as if it was a precious childhood teddy bear. "Thank you, thank you, a million times thank you, Vanellope!"

"Aw, it was nothin'. You put in the hard work yourself, after all…"

"No, really, I can't thank you enough! What you've done, it…it means a lot to me." He drew in a deep breath, his smile shrinking slightly, but becoming no less sincere. "Back in Turbo Time, I called Jet and Set my friends, but I never showed any gratitude towards them. I was just mean to them, and I acted that way until the end. I'm not going to be like that anymore. I want you to know how much I appreciate your help. So…thank you."

Vanellope stiffened, taken off-guard by his sentimentality. Her eyes dropped bashfully. "Uh…you're welcome." She reached out to him, brushing her fingers against his. "Just make me proud tomorrow, Turbo."

"Don't worry!" His sense of glee returned to him, and he grinned at her, oblivious to the sudden somberness that had clouded over her hazel eyes. For him, this was nothing but an occasion for the two of them to celebrate his return to racing…one of the best days of his life. "I won't let you down!"

* * *

 

He was far too happy for the nightmares to overtake him that night, and during the entirety of the next day, he paced throughout the castle, too excited to sit still long enough to work on his scarf. Anxiety nibbled at the edges of his consciousness, blending with excitement to form an uneasy, frothy mixture. What if the other racers freaked out when they saw his ghost boy appearance? What if he lost control and started glitching during the race? Or worse, what if he couldn't even enter the race because the game wouldn't recognize his code when he went to toss in his coin? Various catastrophe situations pranced through his head, but the potential rewards kept him eagerly awaiting the moment when the arcade would close.

He bounced around in his room, counting down the minutes, until finally the clock displayed a good time to get ready. In addition to his goggles, he snatched a pair of red elbow-length gloves out of his vanity drawer; he’d found them weeks ago but had been coveting them for a special occasion, and nothing could be more special than today. He was in such a hurry that he ended up knocking over the frame on the vanity that he’d been using to display the picture of himself with Jet and Set – other than his car, it was his most prized possession, but he was too busy leaping out the door to notice that it had fallen.

The drive to the Royal Raceway seemed agonizingly slow, and Turbo contemplated using his glitch to speed things up several times, but in the end he thought better of it. He was still only able to teleport so many times before he fainted, after all, and he had no plans to pass out on the track.

Vanellope intercepted him just before he reached the track, while the other racers were still milling about and preparing to line up. He could tell that exactly the same emotions that had been eating at him all day were fermenting inside of her, and as she came up to him, she kept bouncing from one foot to the other. "Are you excited, Pajama Boy? You should be," she proclaimed. "Oh, this is gonna be so much fun! We'll be racing together all the time! The gamers are gonna love you!"

"I hope so," replied Turbo. “Uh…what’ll they even think when I show up on the roster, anyway? The gamers, I mean.”

“They’ll think that you’re a super cool bonus character that the programmers put in as an Easter egg. You know, like the Q-Bert guys in Fix It Felix Jr.?”

“Oh, right. Yeah, that makes sense.” He glitched, then winced.

"Aw, Pajama Boy, don't start glitching on me now!" Vanellope wagged a finger in his face. "Come on, where's your confidence?! This is what we've been training for, buddy boy! This is why I've been giving you glitch lessons for the past month! You're finally gonna be a real racer again, so get excited!"

He firmed his shoulders, tilted up his chin, and nodded in confirmation. "I can do it!" he declared. "I'm Turbo, the greatest racer ever!"

"That's the spirit! Now come on, bring your sugary T car to the starting line! You can put it right next to mine! Then you can line up with the other racers…" She pressed her lips together. "Um, if they stare at you when they first see you, don't be upset. They'll change their tune real quick when they see what a good racer you are."

"It's okay. I'm used to having people stare at me." He couldn't help but sigh.

He should have known that something was going to go wrong, starting from when he gathered beneath the popcorn box with the other fourteen avatars while they waited for Vanellope to give the daily announcements. Everyone  _was_  staring at him, and even though he had grown accustomed to this sort of treatment over time, something about these crawling eyes made him feel particularly uncomfortable. He spotted one of the girls, Taffyta, whispering into the ear of Rancis Fluggerbutter, and they both looked away when he turned his head in their direction.

 _Something is wrong here_ , he thought.  _Something is really, really wrong here. Maybe if I could just remember…_

_Remember, remember, remember, hoo-hoo-hoo!_

He glitched. That last part hadn't felt like his own mental voice.

Vanellope mentioned him in her speech, although not directly. All she said was, "Um, as I'm sure you all can see, we have a new racer joining us today. He's my friend from another game, and he'll be competing with us. Please make him feel welcome." And then she smiled with an uncharacteristic amount of trepidation, looking down so that her gaze landed on Turbo, and somehow he managed to smile back.

And at last, the time of judgment had arrived: all of the avatars pulled out their gold coins and lined up in front of the winner's cup, while he nervously shuffled up at the back, clutching his token as if it were a life preserver. Vanellope speed-glitched her way down from the popcorn box and stood beside him, one pudgy little hand lightly gripping his sleeve. Her presence was admittedly reassuring.

"JUBILEENA BING-BING! SNOWANNA RAINBEAU! GLOYD ORANGEBOAR!" One by one, every Sugar Rush racer was listed on the board, each name accompanied by a small icon and a round of applause from their respective supporters. The line inched upwards as the children hurried off to their cars, until only Turbo and Vanellope were left standing on the sidelines. Turbo suddenly realized that he was petrified, and that slight glitches were crawling across his skin. "Y-you go first, glitter-graphics," he whispered.

Vanellope shrugged and skipped forward, tossing her coin nonchalantly. It bounced upwards, landed in the winner's cup, and the announcer's voice boomed, "VANELLOPE VON SCHWEETZ!"

The crowd cheered loudest of all for their president, and Turbo stepped forward, steadying himself with a deep breath. All of this attention and praise could just as easily be his…it was no longer out of reach. He only had to throw his coin, and he could prove himself. As his eyes roamed across the "assorted fans" section, he noticed that Felix and Calhoun had arrived (sitting next to Ralph, of course) and were both smiling and nodding at him, silently urging him on. He felt a surge of renewed confidence. Suddenly, he knew that he could do this.

Turbo strode forward and threw his coin. It arced high above the track, glinting like a slice of sunlight, spinning down gracefully into the golden trophy perched atop the starting line. As it fell, he was once again gripped by the fear that his code wouldn't be recognized and that nothing would go up on the board at all…

But that wasn't what happened.

All it took to turn the day from one of his best ever into one of his worst ever was the simple flip of a coin. That was it; that was all he'd done to deserve what came next. And when the name went up beside the number 16 on the enormous screen, the announcer's voice of course shouted it out loudly and proudly, oblivious to how the spectators and Turbo himself were reacting to this turn of events.

One coin, two words. And the name that the jumbotron blared out was:

"KING CANDY!"


	11. Unwanted revelations

Every single person at the Royal Raceway – from the sentient candies lining the bleachers, to the racers, to Vanellope and Turbo – seemed to draw in a collective, mortified breath in perfect unison. Thick silence clotted the air, all sound somehow muffled after the jumbotron's announcement. And through it all, the stylized icon of King Candy never gave so much as a flicker on the board, smiling down at the assembled crowd with a too-good-to-be-true jolly smile.

Turbo couldn't do anything except stare and glitch, frantically grappling for something that resembled comprehension. What had he done that the other avatars hadn't? He'd just tossed his coin into the winner's cup like everybody else, and then…King Candy had shown up.

King Candy. The evil former monarch of Sugar Rush, a fragment of scrapped coding run amok, the person responsible for dethroning Vanellope and reducing her to nothing but an outcast and a glitch. A regular recurring player in Turbo's nightmares, returning to warp and melt and leer night after night. A character who had been dead for quite some time. Why was his name up on the board? And why in the world had it happened after Turbo had thrown in his token? It just didn't add up.

_Remember remember remember…_

"I knew it!" shrieked a high-pitched voice. Turbo spun around to find that the hot-pink strawberry girl, Taffyta, had one hand clapped against her chubby cheek, while the other jabbed an accusing finger in his direction. "I knew it! I knew he looked familiar!" she screeched. "That's Turbo, the creepy sicko who took over our game and erased everybody's memories!"

Her words crashed into him as if she had dealt him a physical blow, and his limbs exploded into glitches. "Wh…what?" he choked out.

Candlehead began to cry, and Crumbelina di Caramello placed a comforting hand on the other girl's shoulder, glancing fearfully at Turbo and cringing when he gaped back. Rancis Fluggerbutter shouted, "That psycho! I thought he died! H-he's back to kill us all!" Adorabeezle Winterpop, Jubileena Bing-Bing, and Minty Zaki all screamed and attempted to hide behind their karts. And the Sugar Rush denizens in the stands had become jumpier than a bag of popcorn in a microwave; many were even attempting to break for the exits. To Turbo, the whole thing looked like a flurry of fingers pointing at him, a dull roar of people telling him how awful he was, and he couldn't understand why.

Vanellope snatched the cuff of his sleeve and yanked him aside, and being as stunned and near-frozen as he was, he hardly noticed that he was being dragged along behind her until they had ducked into a corner, away from everyone's prying stares. She gazed up at him with pleading hazel eyes that made her look, if anything, more freaked out than he was. "Turbo…"

"W-what's going on?" he stammered, his voice distorting as a violent glitch tore up his body. "Why d-does it say K-King Candy?!"

"It's – it's probably just some weird mistake in the code!" she answered desperately, trying to pull her mouth into a strained parody of a smile. "King Candy was on the roster before. It's just a coincidence that his name popped up when you – "

"No." His lips wrapped around the lone syllable, interrupting her failed reassurances, and she stopped up short.

"No? W-whaddaya mean, no?" she asked. A very slight quiver had crept into both her eyes and her voice.

"You're lying to me…aren’t you?"

It was like he’d only truly accepted the truth after speaking the words, and it must have shown on his face, because Vanellope took notice. He watched as a swallow moved down her suddenly pale throat.

At about this time, Felix, Calhoun, and Ralph hurriedly approached them, having managed to make their way through the panicked racers and civilians. Felix immediately rushed up, exclaiming, "Turbo! Oh, my land, I'm so sorry you had to go through that! Never fear, it's just a little malfunction, we'll get it all sorted out…"

" _No_." This time Turbo's voice was much more solid, tainted with anger around the edges. His pupils roamed across the four people gathered around him, the people who had saved him after Turbo Time had been unplugged, the people who had been withholding information from him since the very beginning. "Don't lie! That had something to do with me, didn't it?! His name only went up on the board after I threw in my coin! What's going on here?! Why does it say King Candy?!"

He was glitching pretty severely now, all of his careful training discarded in the emotional heat of the moment, but his words weren't so garbled that they were unintelligible. Everyone knew what he was saying, and his desire to finally get answers couldn't possibly have been misunderstood.

Calhoun stepped forward, her face pulling into the same grim expression that he imagined it must have held before a major battle. "Listen, kid, we're just as surprised as you are – "

"Will you just tell me the truth already?!" He hadn't meant to sound so hysterical, but he couldn't help it anymore; he had accepted their lies for so long that his need for the truth was now unbearable. "I'm not stupid! I know that you've been hiding something from me since I first got here! What is going on?! Why have you all been treating me so strangely?! What is it that you're not telling me?!"

Glitch glitch glitch. He was panting as he finished his rant, unable to squeeze any of the almost painful tension from his muscles.

Calhoun looked somberly at Felix, who looked at Ralph, who looked at Vanellope. At last, the little girl came towards Turbo, her enormous eyes downcast. "Let’s take a walk," she told him, her voice flat and strained.

Turbo glitched again as an inexplicable pang of terror jolted through his chest. "But…what about the race?" he asked.

"Hey, there's…there's races every day." Her lips didn't even twitch; she was far beyond smiling at this point. "We need to talk, Turbo."

He sucked in a deep breath, reached out, and curled his fingers around hers. He had never held hands with someone before, but right now, he desperately needed something to clutch to and to keep him grounded in reality. "Okay."

"Vanellope…" started Ralph. "Are you sure you wanna do this?"

"It has to be me,” she replied, defeated, but never faltering. “After all, this was all my idea in the first place.” She began to walk away slowly, devoid of her usual energy, still hand in hand with Turbo. "I'll meet up with you guys back at the castle."

Vanellope and Turbo traveled in silence for several minutes as they left the Royal Raceway. She was despondent, refusing to make eye contact with him, and he was practically trembling with the anticipation of what he was about to hear. Whatever it was that had been kept from him, it clearly was not a good thing. But the occurrences at the racetrack today had made him positive that it was something that he needed to know.

Finally, she spoke up. "You told me you dreamed about King Candy. What else have you been dreaming about?"

Turbo paused, frowning. “Uh…I’ve had nightmares about Turbo Time being unplugged. And ones about being pulled into a bright light that burns me. And the other night, I dreamed that we were both racing, but then I started attacking you for some reason…”

Vanellope didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to – for once, he could see perfectly on her face what she was thinking. And what she was thinking was that she’d known what he was going to say.

He glitched.

"…They’re just nightmares,” he said, as if he’d never suspected that they might be anything more. “They don’t mean anything.”

"Oh yes they do. They’re not just nightmares…they’re memories.”

She stopped up short, angling her head to look at him for the first time since they’d left the Royal Raceway. Tear tracks descended down her cheeks, and the sight made his legs go weak – she was _crying,_ actually _crying!_ "I-I don't know how to tell you this, so I'm just gonna say it. Turbo Time and Road Blasters weren't unplugged because they got old or weren't popular anymore. They were unplugged…because of you."

He stared. She had spoken clearly enough and he'd heard her, but what she was saying…made no sense at all. Was she implying that  _he_  had done something to Road Blasters and his own cabinet that had gotten them both unplugged? He couldn’t have done that…surely he wouldn’t have…

"You got jealous of Road Blasters. Really, really jealous. So jealous that you left your own game to try to put yourself in the new one. But you made the software get corrupted, so it was unplugged, and then when the gamers saw that you were missing from your game…"

His last night in Turbo Time flashed into his head: brooding in bed, scheming up ways to prove to the arcade that he was better than anything in RoadBlasters. _But that doesn’t mean that I…!_ He shuddered, scarlet binary flickering up his spine.

"After this game was plugged in, you came in and took over it,” Vanellope continued miserably. “You reprogrammed everything so that I was just a glitch and you were the star. And you locked up all of our memories so we never knew that anything was wrong…”

 _No_.

“Except you had to make yourself look like you belonged in this game in order for us to believe it...”

 _I wouldn’t_.

“So you found an abandoned character model in the code vault, and…”

_I didn’t!_

“What are you saying?” whispered Turbo in a hoarse, shaky voice.

Vanellope winced, her gaze glued to the ground. It was a stupid question for him to have asked, anyway, because they both knew very well –

“Just say it.” This time he was louder, not quite upset, not quite angry – more hysterical than anything. “Do it! _Just say it already_!”

“Okay, okay!” Her hands hovered in front of her face, anticipating a strike, or maybe she just wanted to shield herself from the blow of the truth she’d always known. “Y…you were King Candy.”

Turbo stumbled backwards dizzily, lost his footing, and staggered against the branches of a candy cane sapling for support. He didn’t faint; how could he have fainted when his mind was boiling with enough horror to keep him awake for years? He swore that he could see the dark tide of information bubbling behind his eyes, taunting him.

_You were King Candy._

_You got two games unplugged. You murdered everyone in RoadBlasters. Jet and Set are dead because of you._

_And that little girl over there, the one who you’ve been hanging out with and calling your best friend? You almost destroyed her code, you left her alone and ostracized for fifteen years, you ruined her life just to be the center of attention, because…_

"You’re wrong,” he croaked, scrambling still further back from her, his incessant glitching almost causing him to topple to the ground. “It’s not true…!”

“Why would I lie to you about this, Turbo?!” cried Vanellope. “I wish it wasn’t true! I didn’t want it to be true! That’s why I never told you…!”

"It never happened! Never! You're  _lying_!" he shouted, shaking his head back and forth rapidly. "I would know if that had happened! I would  _remember_  something like that!"

“Not if your memories were erased! And they were, okay?! I know, because – ” She gritted her teeth like it was causing her physical pain to take this any further. “Because I did it! I was the one who decided to reset you!”

He felt faint, but he wasn't sure if it was because of the fact that his body was violently dissolving into static, or because of what she was telling him. His knees had suddenly gone weak, and acid churned up in his stomach. "W-wha…why would you…why would you…!"

"I was trying to _help_ you!” she shouted. “We figured out who you were and I got my game back – but we thought you died after – you did, but you _regenerated_! And you came back and you were going to kill me, and all the grown-ups were ready to kill _you_ , but I didn’t want to, okay?! I wanted to help! Because Felix told me about before RoadBlasters when you didn’t used to be evil, and I thought, maybe there was still some good left in you! But you were so screwed up that you wouldn’t take any help from me and then the grown-ups went in the code vault and ripped you up and then I realized that if we just reset you…!”

_No._

Turbo prodded his foot backwards, and it was a miracle that his shuddering legs didn't dump him to the ground. He squeezed his eyes shut as if that would block out the world, restore things to how they had been just a few short hours before, make it all go away…he couldn't possibly cope with this…

_No, no, no…_

Involuntarily, he clamped his hands over his ears. His teeth chattered, clattering together like a pair of castanets. He had wanted to know. He had thought that he wanted to know the truth, and now he couldn't take it back. Yes, the others had all lied to him, but all of a sudden he was starting to understand that they had cultivated those falsehoods for a reason. He wanted it back, he wanted to return to that comfortable sham of a life that he had been living for the past month…

_Nonononononononono…_

"You're  _lying_!" he screamed, clamping his hands over his ears, desperately hoping to shut out the revelations. " _That's not true! That can't be true! I AM NOT KING CANDY!"_

“ _Will you just stop for ONE SECOND and LISTEN TO ME?!”_ she screamed back, fists balled up and shaking at her sides, eyes scrunched nearly shut. “ _I was HELPING you!_ ”

" _You lied to me!_ " he howled, his hands still firmly shoved against the sides of his helmet. Every breath he gulped down felt coarse and prickling in his lungs…was he beginning to hyperventilate…?

Chest heaving, body wracked with spasming code distortions, Turbo finally lost his balance and sank to his knees. If Vanellope was shouting anything else at him, he couldn’t hear it. He pressed both hands against his face.

It all made sense now. The cutoff in his memories; Vanellope's flashes of uncertainty; Ralph's aggressiveness and overprotectiveness; the fact that he had been forbidden from leaving the castle without supervision and had always been hidden away from the denizens of Sugar Rush. This was why King Candy's name had gone up on the board. This was why the other racers had freaked out when they'd recognized him. Turbo was the evil, deceitful, despicable King Candy. Just because he no longer remembered it didn't mean that it wasn't true.

The horrific crimes that he had committed were truly endless. Because of him, two game cabinets had been unplugged; Jet and Set had died along with Turbo Time; Vanellope had been turned into a glitch, and he'd tried to  _kill_  her, he'd tried to isolate and emotionally torment and  _murder_  his only true friend in the world! No wonder she often looked like she was expecting him to do something awful – she knew what he was capable of, and she had  _always_  known! And yet at the same time…

They had lied to him. They had  _lied_  to  _him_! All of them, Felix, Ralph, Sergeant Calhoun, even Vanellope. They’d never told him about his past, and if it hadn’t been for the Random Roster Race today, they probably never would have. Did they even care about his well-being at all, or all this time, they had only been stowing him away for their own safety, keeping him locked up without giving a thought to how  _he_  felt?! And Vanellope especially…she had said that she was his friend…she'd said…

He glitched. He couldn’t fully grasp any of the thoughts pounding in his head. He didn’t know what to think about the others, or what to believe about himself, and now he was past the point of being able to care.

Vanellope stared at him, her eyes aflame with desperation, breathing so hard that it was making her whole body rise and fall like the tides. She didn’t reach out to him.

"You were just spending time with me because of this?!" he cried, his voice cracking and warping and hysterical. "You were just pretending to be my friend so that I wouldn't remember?!"

Her eyes flared even wider. " _What?!_ Of course not! How could you say something like that?! I was the only one who really thought you could be good again, even after everything you did to me! I cared about you from the start! I _saved_ you!”

" _No you did not!"_ He could no longer hold back the screams, no matter how heartbreaking she may have looked as her face crumpled. The words were spewing from his mouth uncontrollably. " _You were just trying to protect yourself! You kept me here because you didn't want other people to see me! It had nothing to do with how I felt! Well, I don't need to be a racer here! I don't need this game! And I don't need YOU!"_

Darkness lingered at the corners of his vision; his body was dissolving into strands of static and binary code; and yet somehow, Turbo still managed to scrabble to his feet and bolt away from her. He could imagine that she was probably shouting for him and reaching out to stop him, that she was yelling for him to come back…but after a moment, he was no longer aware of any of that, because something else happened.

He heard the voice. It was the voice that had spoken to him in his nightmares and during the day, in his bedroom and in Diet Cola Mountain – the voice always urging him to remember. He had never heard it with his ears; this voice was only audible in his mind, because that was where it had been the entire time.

" _That's right, we don't need them!"_ chuckled the voice that he now knew as King Candy’s. It was a jolly, harmless voice on the surface, but underneath it was a cruelty worse than any he’d ever known, like candy wrapper surrounding a razor blade. It had never been so loud before, or so _close_ , to the point where it even overpowered the sound of his heartbeat.

_But Vanellope said that she wiped my memories…!_

Yes, but a character’s memories weren’t as clear cut as save files on a game screen. Turbo knew enough about code to understand that when you were getting rid of something, actually deleting it often led to a lot of inconvenient errors down the line, so normally the offending items were just…detached. Separated. Left free-floating in the code without linking to anything.

_But if you detach a memory, where does it go?_

" _We’re fine on our own, and we always have been,"_ the voice continued. " _And do you know why?_ " Now Turbo was losing control of his own body. Blackness rose up, poised to crash over him, and yet he still felt himself running, running, running…he was in someone else's grasp now, there could be no doubt of that.

" _Because together, we’re the most powerful being in the arcade, and we can take back what’s rightfully ours. The old king is dead…long live the new king!"_

Turbo no longer knew if he was listening to King Candy, or to himself, or even if there was any difference left between the two.

And as the part of him that was still himself lost consciousness, he didn't have time to do anything more than give a weak, terrified little glitch…


	12. Rainbow Bridge confrontation

Something was muffling Turbo's awareness and obstructing all but the barest sliver of his vision as he began to come to, and even as weak and groggy as he was, he could tell that something was wrong. He felt lightheaded...no, not lightheaded, light- _bodied_. As a matter of fact, he was entirely numb, and the eyes that he was peeking blearily out of were not within his control.

He realized that he was at the top of the Rainbow Bridge, at the entrance to Game Central Station, pounding his fists against the force field that kept him entrapped within Sugar Rush. Someone else was hissing under  _his_  breath, muttering curses with  _his_  voice. He would have been disturbed by the fact that he couldn't even feel his hands as they connected with the barrier again and again, if he hadn't recollected the events that had just occurred and who most likely had the reins of his body right now.

"You!" gasped Turbo, and the word somehow forced its way out of his mouth. He glitched, and that seemed to weaken the spell he was under; he felt soreness spread through his hands, and he stumbled back from the barrier, choking and sputtering. His legs were wobbly, possibly confused as to whose commands they should be obeying.

" _Ooh-hoo-hoo, there you are,"_ cooed the voice in his head. It was louder and more versatile than it had ever been before, and it was unmistakably the same one that had come out of King Candy's mouth in those dreams, there could be no doubt of that. " _Never you mind me, just close your eyes, go back to sleep...I have this all under control..."_

Turbo gritted his teeth; every word the voice said caused his head to throb torturously. He had heard it taunting and chanting at him before, but this was the first time that he had ever attempted to carry out an actual conversation with it. "What do you want, King Candy?" he demanded shakily, not pausing to consider the fact that he was speaking aloud to no one.

The voice chuckled gaily, as if surprised by his silliness. " _I'm not King Candy, Turbo,"_ it responded. " _I'm you, the real you...the part of you that remembers."_

"You're not me!" cried Turbo. His hands were flexing, involuntarily, and he realized with a chill shock that the other entity in his mind was testing its abilities. It pressed against his consciousness, as if trying to smother and extinguish him, and it was a struggle to refrain from succumbing to it. "You’re…you’re just a nightmare!"

Jovial chuckling echoed throughout the corridors of his brain.  _"A nightmare?! What a laugh riot. I think you know that I’m real, Turbo. Didn’t the little glitch tell you all about me?”_

“No! I still don’t know who you are!” Though he’d spoken the words in an attempt at denial, he realized that it was true; in real life, the only image of King Candy he’d ever seen had been the icon on the jumbotron, and everything he knew about the former monarch had come from word of mouth. He might have been able to deny that the king was real, if not for the fact that everything made far too much sense now, and the fact that this conversation was happening at all. "Besides, the others…reset me. I'm not who I was anymore. You shouldn't even be here!"

" _Oh but they could never get rid of me. They tried once, and they tried again, but I'm still here, hoo-hoo-hoo! And I came to help you, see? They took all your memories away, but I tried to help you remember a few things. Like the time when that halitosis-riddled warthog forced you to burn yourself up in boiling diet cola, or when that miserable little GLITCH exposed your identity!"_

His arms went limp at his sides as he momentarily surrendered the fight for his bodily functions. “Those flashbacks at the hot spring,” he realized aloud. “And that dream where I was racing…”

" _Now you’re catching on, hoo-hoo! Since I’ve finally got your attention, let me tell you what that meddling quartet never will. Once upon a time, there was a smart and talented racer who hated his life because the programmers had made him a pathetic little child. Fortunately, he figured out the way to drag himself onward and upwards, and before too long, he’d made himself the KING that he always deserved to be! He had a kingdom full of adoring subjects, and he was free to be the greatest racer ever, until one day when a certain wrecker bumbled his way into the game and, well, WRECKED everything!”_

“It wasn’t your game!” protested Turbo. “You stole it from Vanellope!”

The voice laughed raucously, making him wince and wish that he could somehow blot out the sound. “ _No, YOU stole it from her, Turbo. WE did. And what does it matter in the first place? She had everything handed to her on a silver platter, but we worked hard for it! Not that it was enough for these, ahoo, these MEDDLERS – they weren’t content to just take our winnings from us, oh no. They had to beat down and humiliate us over and over and over again!”_

He inhaled deeply, planting his feet apart, taking a last stand against the devious sensation trying to snatch his motor functions away from him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said firmly. “And I don’t remember any of that. But you’re wrong about me! I wouldn’t steal Vanellope’s game, I wouldn’t have turned her into a glitch, I wouldn’t even have gone into RoadBlasters and gotten my game unplugged! I’m not like that!”

" _Hoohoohoo, that’s rich!”_ Turbo’s hands tried to come up and mockingly wipe a false tear away from his eye; he caught them just in time. _“_ _You can’t play any games with me, Turbo – I’m you, remember? And you ARE like that. You have ALWAYS been like that! Isn’t that why everyone called you a FREAK? And besides, even if you don’t remember, I’ve got proof! I can MAKE you remember!”_

Turbo swallowed, teetering on the edge of temptation, but the few pieces of his past that he had glimpsed were hardly reassuring. Maybe Vanellope and Felix and the others  _had_  only withheld the information to protect him, and maybe he would be better off if he  _didn't_  learn any more than he already knew…his uncertainty was weakening his resolve, and with a gasp, he felt King Candy's influence beginning to creep back around his limbs like sticky licorice tentacles.

" _Come on, Turbo. Just for you, a special offer! One free sneak peek of your memories, courtesy of yourself!"_

Fragmented colors and sensations overtook his awareness, sending him reeling. Turbo's startled gasp caught in his throat as he lost his balance, pitching forward. He stretched out his arms as he prepared to come into contact with the ground –

* * *

  _Suddenly he was back in Turbo Time, puttering across the screen in his red car as the game cabinet moved through its idle animations. Jet and Set were chatting in low voices on the track behind him, both of them sprawled across their cars as they awaited a quarter alert. But Turbo could see from his position that there was no one coming. They hadn't been played a single time today, and barely at all yesterday, and the day before that and the day before that…_

_The twins didn't see his perpetual toothy grin twist upside down as he glared across the arcade at the Road Blasters console, which had been placed directly in his line of vision as if to further taunt him. They didn't see the thoughts rushing through his head as he consciously made the decision to abandon the program, as he told himself that he would reclaim the attention and respect that he deserved by any means necessary – even force. What they did see was their so-called friend skidding his car into reverse and making a break for the exit, shattering his intended holding pattern._

" _Turbo?!" exclaimed Jet._

" _What is he doing?!" shouted Set, his face pulling into an expression that occupied the middle ground between frustration and horrified disbelief._

_Turbo growled in the back of his throat as his two competitors practically launched themselves at the side of his vehicle in an attempt to stop his progress. He stomped his foot on the brake pedal, giving no thought to the fact that they were nearly thrown into the road by his movements. "What do you losers want?" he snarled._

" _Turbo, w-where are you going?!" spluttered Jet. "You can't leave the game in the middle of the day!"_

_The back of his throat began to sting and thicken, which he masked with another growl. "Trust me, I won't be missed!"_

_Set's jaw dropped. "What do you mean, you won't be missed?! You're the lead character!"_

" _As if that means anything anymore!" yelled Turbo furiously. "Turbo Time is done. Okay, you guys?! It's over! We're screwed! And since our game is about to get unplugged, it doesn't really matter what I do, does it?!" With that, he yanked the gearshift of his car so sharply that the rod practically detached in his hand._

" _Turbo, wait!" hollered Set as the white racer went tearing down the road._

" _Come back!" Jet practically wailed._

_Turbo ignored them, refusing to allow any remorse to leak through the barriers of rage that he had built up around himself. If he stopped reminding himself that this was all RoadBlasters' fault, all Mr. Litwak's fault, all his stupid, stupid programmers' fault, then he might be forced to come to grips with the conclusion that he was just a lonely, insecure kid who no one cared about. He might have staggered under the revelation that the gamers had never really loved him as a person, or even as a character; they had just wanted a racing game, and as soon as his graphics became irrelevant, they were willing to move on to the next cabinet and restart the cycle from step one. He might have broken down dealing with the fact that at the end of the day, all of his numerous trophies and victory laps meant nothing at all, because he was nothing but a ghost boy and he always would be…_

_He charged into Game Central Station, scaring the inventory off of any NPCs and homeless characters who happened to be in his path, and paid no attention to the Surge Protector's frantic call of "No go-karts in the station!" The RoadBlasters outlet was directly across from Turbo Time, and on such a straight path, Turbo could afford to go as fast as he possibly could._

_He wasn't sure what he had expected to gain from his rampage, really, or what he thought the gamers' reactions would be. Perhaps he would give them enough of a memory jolt to make them realize that there was another, perfectly functional racing game in the arcade, and then he could quickly return to Turbo Time before the quarter alerts began rolling in. Perhaps he’d just know that they were paying attention to him again, at least for that moment, and be satisfied. But one thing was for certain: he never intended to frighten the players, or destroy the opposing console. Those were two side effects of his actions that he had never anticipated._

" _Hey, is that…"_

" _Turbo-Tastic!"_

" _That looks like Turbo!"_

" _What's Turbo doing in this game?!"_

" _Turbo-Tastic! Turbo-Tastic! Turbo-Tastiiiiiiii…"_

_History would remember him as a power-hungry, attention-seeking tyrant, and although he wasn't aware of it at the time, his name would forever become synonymous in arcade lore with malicious game-jumping. But the truth was that it was all an accident. Okay, so Turbo deserting his home was not an accident. He'd known exactly what he was doing, or thought he did, anyway. But he never meant to cause the thing that came next…_

_RoadBlasters was considered to be a high-tech marvel, but it wasn't sophisticated enough to deal with a patch of alien coding interfering with its gameplay. It crashed when Turbo collided with another car on the field of play, its software becoming scrambled beyond repair. All of a sudden, he found himself trapped in a ruined environment, thrashing and struggling and utterly stuck as he tried to make his way back to the outlet. And he was in a race against time, because not only was RoadBlasters now under direct threat of being unplugged, but Turbo Time was too if he didn't get back to it._

_And it was painful…oh, so painful…agony as the malfunction gnashed at every fiber of his being…his memories were starting to slip here, his brain not retaining the sheer amount of pain that he was in, but he did remember the sweet relief that had greeted him when he finally made it into Game Central Station._

_It didn’t last. Moments later, he was gazing at the empty outlet where Turbo Time should have been, horror choking his throat at the realization that he was too late. Jet and Set were nowhere to be seen._

_Something changed in Turbo that day. His narrow escape from the critical error of Road Blasters knocked something loose in his mind, something vital. Maybe it was just an extension of whatever had been broken inside him before; it was like he was glitching on the inside instead of on the outside. And from that day on, he had no choice but to hide from the notoriety that his acts had bestowed upon him, brooding at the bitter unfairness of it all, while his guilt and loneliness festered constantly at the back of his mind._

_They'd be excellent fuel for the malware and viruses that he'd accumulate over the years to prey upon…_

* * *

Turbo choked on a gasp as the memory faded into incoherency, replaced with the world of Sugar Rush seen through eyes that he could only barely control. So it was true; he really had caused both his game and RoadBlasters to be unplugged. Even though he'd always been able to recollect his jealousy and bitterness from back then, as well as his desire to take action and change the life that his programming had given him, never in a million years had he thought that he'd get desperate enough to do something like that…

He realized that he'd just witnessed the last time that he had ever seen Jet and Set, and now the twins' mortified faces had become imprinted into his mind's eye.

 _Maybe it’s not true. Maybe the…King-Candy-thing in my head is feeding me false memories…or maybe I’m just crazy._ He would have believed this last-ditch grab for normality if he could, except that everything he’d just seen rang so true that he would’ve hung his head in shame if he could feel his neck muscles.

A voice called out to him, not through his mind but through his ears…a very familiar little girl's voice. "Turbo?! Turbo, where are you?!"

Whatever was controlling him swung his head over his shoulder, and he gasped, mortified to see that a tiny figure was speed-glitching her way up the rainbow bridge. "Vanellope!" he tried to cry out, but his throat was suddenly gripped by the intangible fingers of that other malicious entity.

" _Oho, look at that, it's your little friend!"_ The voice cackled like a lunatic, as if at a private joke.  _"Let's watch her DIE together, shall we?!"_

Numbness closed over him, and Turbo could only manage a last squeak as the thing inside of him shoved him aside, taking advantage of his emotionally compromised state to lock him out of his own body. But this time, he didn't black out. He could still see through his eyes, and now this really  _had_  become a living nightmare, because he was going to be forced to watch himself kill Vanellope while acting as nothing but a bystander to the whole situation.

_But she can regenerate here! It’s her game! I can’t really hurt her…!_

Except that King Candy, or whatever it actually was, must have known that too. It couldn’t cause any permanent damage; the worst it could do was scare her. But…

_It can do whatever it wants, and she’ll never know that it’s not me doing it._

_And if it never lets go of me, then I’ll never be able to tell her…_

"Turbo!" Vanellope scampered up to him frantically, her hair sticking out wildly in all directions, her face dusted with grit kicked up by a fast drive. "Turbo, there you are! What are you doing here?! You – you know you can't leave the game!"

Turbo turned around slowly, a snarl working its way up through his throat. He saw her freeze, presumably stunned into stillness by the feral expression that he could imagine was masking his face. In reality, he was pounding at the walls of his metaphorical prison, screaming, _Vanellope! Get away! It's a trap, he's trying to trick you!_ But of course, she had no way of hearing that.

"No…T-Turbo…" Her face twisted up. "You’re…”

He realized that he was glitching, but not in the way that he usually did; pixels fizzed along his body, bringing changes in his appearance that rapidly sprang into existence and then fizzled away again. Flashes of lacy cuffs, patches of purple velvet, maybe a rosy red clown nose…

_Vanellope, turn around, get out of here, get OUT…!_

"Is this your way of paying me back, you little glitch?" snarled Turbo, and if he could have flinched at the sound of his own voice, he would have. The words came out churning and distorted, as if King Candy's voice was blending with his. "Since I erased your memories and made you a glitch, you've decided to do the same thing to me?!"

She instinctively took a step back. “That was an accident! I-I didn’t realize that you’d be a glitch!”

 _I know it was! Come on, glitter-graphics, you've gotta get out of here! You know this isn't me…you must know!_ But she had seen the monstrous version of him long before she had ever met the racer she'd dubbed "Pajama Boy." Would their happy experiences from the past month really be enough to override a lifetime of abuse?

"Oh, of course, an accident," he retorted in a mocking tone, his lips contorting into a sneer. " _You're_ the accident, not me!"

His arms flew out and he shoved her, hard. She went stumbling back with a stifled cry, and Turbo noted with horror how close to the edge of the Rainbow Bridge she was. The vain reassurance that she couldn’t die here catapulted out of his head, and he resisted the heavy presence draped across his brain with every scrap of strength he had left, but to no avail.  _No! No, no, no! Don't hurt her, DON'T HURT HER!_

"Turbo, stop!” cried Vanellope. “You have to calm down! Something’s happening to you, but we can fix it, just calm down for one second…!”

"Of course something’s _happening_ to me!” he snarled. “I can finally see past all the lies that you put in my head! I can finally _remember_!”

Now she was teetering on the boundary between the bridge and the empty air, only a hair's breadth away from going over the edge. Fortunately, she realized how precarious her position was, and she glitched behind him – but Turbo wanted to scream when she still refused to run.

“How much do you remember?” she asked fearfully, eyes urgently scanning the garbled sprite in front of her.

His hand shot out, snatched her by the collar of her sweatshirt, and actually _hoisted her into the air_ , her feet dangling above the ground as he grinned nastily into her face.

“Enough,” he replied, his voice now wholly King Candy’s.

In an instant, Turbo saw what was going to happen: he’d throw her off the bridge, and even though she’d regenerate, he would watch her experience the suffering of death, and resurrection. Then he’d do it again, and again, and again, as many times as he could get away with. If he couldn’t get outside the game, then he’d turn this game into her personal torture chamber, full of sharpened candy canes for impaling and bubbling cola pits for incinerating. Maybe if she moved now, she could escape…but was petrified, too transfixed to glitch away.

_ENOUGH!_

Turbo punched at King Candy’s influence with all of his willpower, bashing against the barriers in his mind as hard as he could. And they gave, if only for a second; he felt his body falter. Something must have changed in his face, because Vanellope’s eyes suddenly widened, and he knew, he _knew_ , that she was seeing him, and that she somehow understood what was going on.

That was all he needed. He seized at the weight draped over his mind, clawing at it, flailing, determined not just to escape it but to destroy it. Vanellope’s collar slipped from his grasp as he doubled over, howling with pain in King Candy’s voice.

“What do you think you’re DOING, you little – !”

“I-I-I-I’m-m-m s-s-sti-i-i-i-ill he-e-e-e-r-r-re…!” His words came out stuttering and glitchy, but at least they sounded like they’d come from _him_.

“You’re RUINING all my plans, STOP that, OUCH…!”

“V-V-V-Van-n-n-n – ”

“Why are you HELPING her, she DESTROYED us, STOP…!”

He didn’t stop. His head shrilled with pain and he could barely see straight, but right now he wasn't thinking of anything but Vanellope, who was gazing up at him with wide eyes as his body was yanked between the grip of two consciousnesses. King Candy could try to come back again, or ten times, or a thousand times, and it wouldn’t matter. Turbo refused to let himself be taken advantage of like this. Every second he had to, he’d never stop fighting.

At last, the other presence seemed to realize this, because the voice seemed to retreat into whatever dark recess in his mind that it had originally come from. " _You’re going to regret this,"_ it hissed, but the words were faint and tinny, as well as quickly muffled by him beating it back. Under control…for now.

Dull, nauseating pain bloomed across his body, and he swayed on his feet, panting raggedly. But the last glitches were fading away now, and when he looked down at himself, all he saw were the jumpsuit and red sneakers that he’d been programmed with: no purple velvet, no lace.

He dragged his head upwards and saw Vanellope.

For several long moments, the two of them were facing each other, both trembling from the shock and strain of the ordeal. Turbo was waiting for her to scream in horror and run off in the opposite direction, since surely their measly month-long friendship couldn't withstand all of the terrible things that he had done to her. So he was stunned when she tackled him into a sitting position as she threw her arms around him, gathering him into a hug so suffocatingly tight that he suspected she wouldn't have let go even if he had turned around and started choking her. She buried her face into his chest, her tiny hands bunching up the fabric of his jumpsuit.

Turbo swayed again before sinking heavily to his knees, and Vanellope plopped down right along with him. Almost by instinct, he gave her shoulder a feeble little push. “No,” he croaked.

She drew back long enough to squint up at him. “What’re you saying ‘no’ for?”

“You shouldn’t touch me,” he said, his voice flat and slightly raspy from how much yelling he’d done to me. “I-I could…I might…”

The next thing he knew, she had drawn herself up to his eye level, staring straight into his face. “Turbo,” she said firmly. “That wasn’t _you_.”

A veil of unreality seemed to slowly fall away from around him, and he felt his mind clearing, rational thought slowly returning as the shock leaked out of him. Leftover fear panged in his chest, making him gulp down a mouthful of air. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and the afternoon’s events stuttered behind his eyelids, jerky and disjointed.

“What _happened_?” he gasped, gazing pleadingly at Vanellope, but she could only shake her head. After a slight pause, she flopped silently against him, their shoulders pressed together and her straggly hair tickling his cheek.

Turbo wasn’t sure how long they stayed there, frazzled and dazed, both of them looking like they’d been on the wrong end of the outlet during a power surge. By the time Sergeant Calhoun swooped down in front of them on the sleek hovering vehicle she called a cruiser, Turbo only had two thoughts left in his head.

The first was that he wished he had never tried to enter that stupid Random Roster Race.

The second was that he wished he had never been programmed at all.


	13. Their story

All three of the adults had been out searching for Turbo and Vanellope; Calhoun just happened to be the one who’d found them first. She didn’t ask any questions or comment on the fact that both were dirty and wide-eyed and silent with shock. Probably she just figured that Vanellope revealing the truth had done a number on both of them, which was at least half right.

It was presumably fairly late into the evening when they finally arrived at the castle; Turbo couldn't be entirely sure, since the sky still never changed in Sugar Rush, and he had been too distraught to keep track of time after the disastrous events at the Royal Raceway. Calhoun ushered them inside, saying something about how Ralph and Felix would want to see that they were okay, but Turbo just shook his head and retreated against the nearest wall. He wasn’t ready to face them yet, and wasn’t sure if he ever would be.

He scrunched his eyes shut, hoping that maybe shutting off one of his senses would help him feel a little less overwhelmed. After a moment, he felt a familiar hand insinuate itself in his.

_Vanellope…_

“I yelled at you before,” he murmured, opening his eyes. He thought that if he focused on any of the things he’d done to her that were worse than yelling, he’d probably freak out.

It took her a second to figure out that he meant when she’d first told him about King Candy, not when they were on the Rainbow Bridge. “Oh, right. I guess I kind of yelled at you, too.”

Being yelled at was the least of what he deserved. “I-I’m sorry for what I said…I didn’t mean it, honest. I wasn’t really thinking straight...”

“It’s okay,” she assured him. “I shouldn’t have yelled, anyway. I knew you were gonna take it bad, but I couldn’t stand to see you acting like you hated me.”

 _And then I almost threw you off a bridge, so you probably figured that I hated you when that happened, too._ A shivering glitch zipped through him; Sugar Rush maintained a constant comfortable temperature, but he’d never felt so cold in his life.

“I just don’t understand,” he said helplessly. “Why did you want to save me? You didn’t know anything about me before I was King Candy. You didn’t know if I was good or bad.”

“I told you before. Felix talked about what you were like when he knew you, because I was curious. Ralph thought I was crazy for wanting to hear about you, but I thought it was interesting, and I also felt a little sorry for you. So when you came back…” She shrugged. “I guess I just took a chance.”

She made it sound so simple, but Turbo still couldn’t wrap his mind around the concept. “But you had no idea what would happen. I could have hurt you!”

“But you didn’t.”

“But I just – !”

Then Vanellope’s hand was splayed across his mouth, cutting him off. She gave her head a brisk little shake, then flicked her eyes back and forth between Turbo and the grown-ups. The grown-ups...he’d actually forgotten that they were there. For the first time, he noticed that he was in the kitchen, and the adults were all standing around by the doorway, muttering to each other.

“Don’t talk about it here,” she hissed. “Look, when we first reset you, we were prepared for anything, okay? If you turned out to be dangerous, we had a plan to just delete you. But we didn’t end up needing to do that.”

He cast another skittish look over at the grown-ups. Was that what they were conspiring about right now…?

“But then you started telling me about your dreams,” Vanellope continued in a rushed whisper. “And I realized you were starting to remember. I almost told the grown-ups, but then I thought about how worried they were that you’d be dangerous, and I just…couldn’t do it. We were friends by then, and how was I s’posed to watch my friend get deleted? So I just hoped that it wouldn’t go any further, but…”

His mind was still working sluggishly. “You’re saying that you don’t want me to tell them about what just happened.”

“Duh.”

“But…it was horrible, and I don’t even know what it was!” he protested. “You said that you and Felix were the ones who reset me, right? Maybe if you know things about my code, you could go in there and figure out what’s wrong – ”

“I will, if I get the chance,” interrupted Vanellope. “But you can’t tell the grown-ups! If they find out and think that the best solution is to pull your plug, they might really do it, and I’m not taking risking it!”

“Let them do it.” Turbo uttered the words flatly, hardly aware of what he was saying.

She gaped at him. “Turbo!”

“Let them delete me. I don’t care anymore. Maybe it would even be better that way.”

“ _Turbo!_ ” She stretched up, clapped her hands on both sides of his head, and forced him to look at her. “You don’t mean that. And you _know_ you don’t mean it, so don’t even say it!”

His lower lip quavered briefly, and an instant later, her expression softened. Before he knew it, she’d flung her arms around him, one cheek smushed hard against his chest.

“I’ve had enough stupid drama for one night,” she mumbled. “So don’t screw with me like that. You’re my best friend, Turbo. I love you.”

Turbo's breath hitched. A startled glitch rolled through him from head to toe. He realized that no one had ever said that to him before…that he could remember, anyway, but somehow he doubted that those three words were ever present during the thirty years of bitter darkness that he couldn't recollect. Almost as shocking as the declaration itself was how plainly and matter-of-factly she had stated it. For her, it clearly wasn't a big to-do. She wasn't wavering for a second in how she felt towards him.

"I love you too, Vanellope," he responded, awe present in his voice as he realized just how much he genuinely meant that sentiment, that it wasn't just something he was replying with out of an obligation. Up until now, he had always associated love with romance, but he loved Vanellope like a best friend or even a kid sister. And there was no need for them to make a big show out of their emotions. Their love didn't need any flowers or sparkles or pink neon hearts to make it true; it could simply exist, a bond between two young kids who were practically siblings.

He folded his arms around her, and returning the embrace somehow helped him understand that no matter how awful he might feel right now, he didn’t really want to be deleted. In fact, he wanted to keep going more than he had in a very long time. And he’d miss the little moments like this if he was gone.

His eyes must have slipped shut again, because the next thing he knew, somebody cleared their throat and he saw Ralph, Felix, and Calhoun standing over him. All three of them were jumpy and on-edge, even Felix.

"Hey, kiddo," the handyman greeted him wearily, a resigned smile flickering to his face. "Are you…are you doing okay?"

 _Stupid question_ , thought Turbo, but he just wordlessly shook his head.

Felix removed his cap, wringing it between his hands regretfully. “Oh, Turbo. I’m so sorry that you had to find out this way. If we had known that King Candy's name was going to go up on the board, then maybe…well, actually, I don't know what we'd have done. I wouldn't have had the heart to stop you from trying to race, even if I had known."

“I don’t want you to be sorry,” murmured Turbo. “You didn’t tell me that you’d wiped my memory, and I guess that now I know why. But I still don’t understand what happened. I need you to tell me the whole story.”

Ralph released a noise that was somewhere between a cough and a grunt.

“Uh…are you sure about that?” asked Felix nervously. He’d crushed his cap flat between his palms. “Because I really don’t think that it’s going to make you feel any better…”

“It’s my story,” said Turbo simply. “I don’t remember it, so you have to tell me.”

Felix glanced up at Ralph and Calhoun for guidance; Ralph shook his head dismissively, and Calhoun gave a shrug and said, “What harm could it do at this point? The big bombshell’s already been dropped. Knowing the rest won’t make it any worse.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” muttered Ralph.

“All right,” Felix conceded. “We’ll tell you. Let me just get Vanellope to bed, and – ”

“Forget that!” proclaimed Vanellope, folding her arms. “If you’re gonna talk about this, then I have to be there. It’s my story too.”

“And mine,” added Calhoun.

“And mine,” Ralph admitted begrudgingly.

Felix slowly straightened out his cap and pulled it back over his head. “In a way, I guess it’s all of ours. Let’s go and sit at the table. I’m afraid that this isn’t the happiest story, but at least it doesn’t end so badly…”

* * *

 

"After Turbo Time was unplugged, there's a period of about ten years where we don't know where you were and everybody thought you were dead," Calhoun began, once everyone had dragged up a chair. The servants had yanked blackout curtains across all the windows, blocking the lemon-drop sun to create an artificial night, which made it feel very late, possibly even past midnight. "Not that I was there myself, of course, but I've taken a…special interest in this case. Anyway, then Sugar Rush was plugged in, and you went ahead and disguised yourself as King Candy and locked up the memories of the people here so that they wouldn't question you. You must have done it pretty quickly, too. If you'd gotten here after the Sugar Rush racers or NPCs had already started mingling out in Game Central, then someone might have noticed that something was up."

Turbo had heard all this from Vanellope earlier, but now a horrible thought occurred to him. "Who was King Candy before I got here? He wasn't…a real character whose body I stole, was he?"

Felix shook his head. "No, King Candy was an unused character model locked up in the coding vault. The body was finished, and he even had a voice file all ready, but he was abandoned at the last minute and they never gave him a brain or emotions or anything. My guess is that the developers must have decided that they wanted a princess instead of a king. It's more marketable that way, you see. So they turned one of the racers into the new ruler of the game."

"Me,” Vanellope chimed in.

Ralph dipped his head in a grim nod. "Yeah. She always told me that racing was in her code, even after she found out who she really was. It turns out she was right. Lucky for her that glitch you gave her turned out to be more like a special ability."

Turbo turned Ralph's choice of words around in his mind –  _that glitch you gave her_  – and he felt guilt and hysteria trying to break through the numbness that had settled over him. "I-I really tried to delete her code?" he whispered. "Just to be the ruler of the game?"

"Ah…the short answer is yes,” replied Felix. “But the long answer is more complicated than that. When we went into your code – ”

“We’re not there yet,” Vanellope interrupted. “We have to tell the _whole_ story. Including how all of us met!”

Turbo lifted his head. "Yeah, come to think of it, I don’t really understand that either. All this time, I've pretty much taken it for granted that you guys just hang around in this game and take care of Vanellope and stuff. But how did a bad guy, a retro platformer hero, and a soldier lady with a giant gun end up getting involved in all this? How do you even  _know_  Vanellope, and why did you take an interest in me?"

"It's a pretty long story, kiddo," said Felix. "But we'll tell you."

And they did exactly that.

They told him about how Ralph, the under-appreciated antagonist of Fix-It Felix Jr., had finally gotten fed up after the thirtieth anniversary of his game and "gone Turbo." This also required an explanation of how the phrase "going Turbo" had become accepted talk for illegal game-jumping, usually with malicious intent. (Turbo, of course, winced at that; as if coping with his guilt wasn't enough, he now had infamy for his past misdeeds to tail him for the rest of his life.)

They told him about how Ralph had infiltrated Hero's Duty with the hope of gaining a medal to show to the Nicelanders, and how along the way, he had accidentally ended up in Sugar Rush and taken a Cy-Bug with him. Calhoun got a bit too enthusiastic in explaining how she had whomped him over the head with her helmet after he'd broken formation, and the wrecker seemed nervous that she might try to give Turbo a live demonstration.

They told him about how Ralph and Vanellope happened to stumble across each other, and how after Vanellope had stolen Ralph's medal to gain entry into the day's Random Roster Race, they had come together to try and remedy both of their predicaments. The friendship turned out to be destined to last: two outcasts, one a glitch and one a bad guy, working towards their own ends and each other's. Vanellope's candy kart, which Turbo had so mercilessly taunted, was actually the first car she'd ever owned, lovingly crafted by her and Ralph in the kart bakery; her proper royal vehicle had been stolen by King Candy. He'd also stolen her home and her popularity, which had forced her into exiled living in an abandoned bonus level and being tormented nonstop by the other racers when all she had wanted to do was join them.

They told him about Vanellope learning how to drive in Diet Cola Mountain and then entering the Random Roster Race, where King Candy had assaulted her with his kart to try and prevent the game from resetting, only for her glitch to reveal his true identity. Vanellope seemed eager to brush over this part, but she did mention that there’d been a Cy-Bug at the end of the tunnel in the Ice Cream Mountains, which had devoured the king in one bite. (Turbo remembered the nightmare where he was racing, with the monster at the end of the tunnel, and finally realized what he’d really been dreaming about.) Then the Cy-Bugs had risen up from beneath the sugary kingdom, nearly overtaking it. Calhoun explained why this was a bad thing: Cy-Bugs were non-intelligent creatures, programmed only to eat, kill, multiply, and destroy anything they touched. So they had been on the verge of consuming Sugar Rush entirely, and poor little Vanellope, being a glitch, was unable to escape the doomed game. And then Ralph had gotten the bright idea to go back to the mountain and start a makeshift beacon by collapsing the Mentos cork, but when he'd gotten there, he'd found…

"…a giant Cy-Bug with King Candy's head," announced Ralph, holding out his massive hands to emphasize the beast's size. "It was the one that had eaten you – him – and Cy-Bugs become whatever they eat. All the craziness of the original, except way more dangerous, because now that you – he – was in a Cy-Bug, killing was the only thing he could think about. Well, I escaped from him and started the eruption anyway, and I was falling straight towards the lava, until Vanellope drove out of nowhere and saved me. And while we were escaping, this big, like, pillar of lava shot up from the mountain, and all of the Cy-Bugs flew into it and were burned alive, including the King Candy bug – "

"Ralph, he doesn't need to hear this," reprimanded Felix crossly.

Turbo, who was by now hugging his knees against his chest, felt his eyes widening as another fragment of memory dislodged itself from his brain. On the day that Vanellope took him to Diet Cola Mountain, he’d had those flashbacks… "Oh, so  _that's_  what that was," he mumbled to himself. Truth be told, though, very little of the story had triggered any sort of recollections in his brain, save the tidbits that he had already witnessed through his nightmares.

Ralph cleared his throat. "Anyway, that was the end of you in Sugar Rush, or so we thought. See, it turns out that you had coded yourself into the game, so you regenerated. Took you a while, but you did it, all right.”

“We had no idea that you could even do that,” continued Felix. “Meanwhile, we were spending more time together, and Vanellope started asking me and Ralph if we knew anything about you.”

“I wouldn’t talk about it,” Ralph declared, holding up his hands in a profession of innocence. “I had no clue why she was asking that stuff – I mean, why live in the past when things were so much better now, right?”

Vanellope rolled her eyes at him. “I was _curious_ , okay? And I guess I thought that maybe if Turbo was, like, a total loser or something, it’d make me feel better about what happened. But when Felix actually answered my questions, I saw that it wasn’t quite like that, and it made me wonder about you.”

"And then, months later, you came back to confront us," Felix continued somberly. "For revenge, I suppose, since we’d taken back Sugar Rush. By this time, Tammy and I had just gotten married, and all of us were splitting our time between here and my game. We were here on the night that you came after us.”

“I don’t know what you were thinking,” grunted Ralph. “You were screwed up and flickering all over the place, and I could’ve smashed you into paste. I was gonna, until Vanellope pranced right up to you.”

“I didn’t _prance_ ,” she corrected. “I just wanted to try _talking_ to you! All the grown-ups were right there in case you tried anything, plus it was my game, so you weren’t exactly gonna be able to kill me. All I did was ask if you remembered the things that Felix had told me about. And you seemed like you were really thinkin’ about it, and you were kinda glitching back and forth between King Candy and a weird, old-looking Turbo, but the more I talked, the more I started to see…”

"…me," finished Turbo, blinking. "Y-you saw the real me."

"We more than saw you, kid," grunted Ralph. "And when you got a good look at how you were reverting back to your original form, you went  _ballistic._  You started screaming – "

“Screaming how you weren’t a kid anymore, and you weren’t going to let Vanellope trick you into being a pathetic little kid again, and at that point we didn’t have many options.” Felix sighed. “Tammy and I went to the code vault, and we…did what we had to do.”

Vanellope made a scrunched-up face at the tabletop. “I tried to help you,” she said quietly. “I told you that I could give you a new life. But you wouldn’t listen to me.”

Turbo felt his guilt well up and threaten to choke him, but Calhoun swiftly butted in with, “You _couldn’t_ listen to her, actually.”

“H-huh?” he stammered, managing to make eye contact with her for half a second.

“Your code wasn’t completely your own at that point, Turbo,” she explained resolutely. “And I’m not just talking about the leftover Cy-bug garbage – although that was definitely in there. But even before that, you’d gathered quite a little collection of malware in your head, the kind of stuff that characters pick up when they’re not coded into a game for a decade or so. Malware’s trickier than viruses, more insidious; it reprograms the host instead of destroying them. Once it’s inside you, it finds the darkest, nastiest parts of your personality and uses them to get what it wants, like a garden weed growing big enough to cover an entire city.”

He peered up at her owlishly. “How do you know all that?”

“I’m in charge of a game that’s basically full of viruses,” she answered with the tiniest of shrugs. “I make it my business to know about these things. But anyway, by the time you got to us for the second time, your mind was half-malware if not more. It wasn’t physically possible for you to just give up the chase.”

With the tone that she said this in, it was as if she was trying to use this as a justification for his actions, easing the burden of his regret by some slight increment. She might as well have been saying,  _you're still somewhat of a victim here, maybe, kind of, sort of, if you tilt your head and squint_. Turbo knew better than that, but he couldn't say that he didn't appreciate the effort.

“So…then Felix and Vanellope reset me,” he pressed on, his gaze swinging over to their chairs. “And you took the malware out of my code, right?”

Felix squirmed sheepishly. "Well…no. We separated it out, but it was so deeply embedded into your code that I wasn’t sure you could survive having it completely deleted. So we took that, and the extra material you’d been using, and all of your memories since the day that you went into RoadBlasters, and we pushed them aside so that they couldn’t bother you anymore.”

 _Except that they_ are _bothering me, to put it lightly._ Turbo thought back to the fiasco on the Rainbow Bridge; could it be explained away by a free-floating malware infection? But Calhoun had made it sound like malware needed a host in order to have any sort of autonomy…trying to think about it made his temples throb, and he realized that he was too exhausted to figure anything out right now. He was hardly even tempted to tell Felix that his reset method had backfired.

“And it took for- _ever_ ,” commented Vanellope, in what Turbo suspected was an attempt to keep the grown-ups from finding out their mutual secret.

“Well, we had a lot of material to go through,” Felix pointed out. “Turbo had changed pretty much everything about himself, even his appearance. And once we got the King Candy skin off, his character model still had to be fixed, since he’d bent it out of shape in order to fit the skin.”

“Yeah, you would’ve been all wrinkly and weird, otherwise,” she agreed. “Like when I glitched you up at my first Random Roster Race, you looked way creepier than you do now. Just a few things stayed the same…”

"Like my white skin and yellow eyes. And my red T," murmured Turbo, nodding as he ran a hand down his ghost boy face. This was beginning to make more and more sense. He’d had that dream where King Candy had transformed into _something,_ something that looked like him, but was twisted in a dozen different ways. Maybe that was what Vanellope had seen. He might not have been the most realistically designed character around – he still had an oversized head, spindly legs, and some pudge around his stomach, much to his chagrin – but he wasn't nearly as grotesque as the distorted nightmare thing that had leered at him from the mirror. And despite the eeriness brought on by the limited technology available at the time of his creation, it was still visible in his face that he was a ( _go ahead, say it, admit that you're a kid_ ) young teenager. He just looked like…well, like a ghost boy. He'd been tagged with that awful nickname for a reason, after all.

"So after everything we've been through, it turns out that King Candy was just a messed-up little kid prancing around in an adult body," Ralph muttered under his breath. "Suddenly, this is all starting to add up."

"And that's it," murmured Calhoun, placing her hand on top of Felix's. "That's how you ended up here."

Turbo squeezed his eyes shut, his body sputtering with glitches as he tried to process all of the information that had been relayed to him today. Now he knew why he had been treated so strangely from the start, why he wasn't allowed to go outside for fear of being seen, why he was a glitch…and why he was still around at all. Vanellope really had taken him in, even after he'd treated her in the most horrible, hateful ways imaginable. It was now abundantly clear to him why his memories had been wiped: knowing the truth had complicated his life beyond comprehension, and now he felt worse than ever. Hard, hot pain swelled in his throat.

"M'sorry…" His throat, thick with the threat of tears, muffled the apology so that it sounded like gummy baby-talk.

Ralph, who’d gone dangerously quiet during the latter part of the discussion, glowered down at Turbo with a stormy expression. "You should be," he said.

"That's enough out of you, Wreck-It," snapped Calhoun. "The kid's had a tough day. Cut him some slack."

"Well, excuse me if I can't feel all that bad for him, since he's the one who caused all of this trouble in the first place!" He scowled.

Vanellope stood up on her chair, lips puckering with disapproval. “Ralph…!”

Turbo's breath quickened as his heretofore repressed hysteria spread into both his chest and his mind. "M'sorry…I d-didn't mean to…I really d-d-didn’t…!”

"Oh, don't even give me that!" growled Ralph. "Of course you  _meant_  to, you little brat. Maybe you don't remember it, but guess what? Nobody forced you to try and take over RoadBlasters!  _You_  did that, because you couldn't stand not being the center of attention! And King Candy might have made Vanellope's life miserable for fifteen years, but do you know who had control of him?!  _You_. Malware is only as bad as the person it infects, and with you, it was about as bad as it could get! So no, I can't exactly feel bad for you when everything that happened was  _all your fault_!"

And that was it. That was Turbo's breaking point.

_It is my fault._

_It's my fault that Jet and Set are dead._

_It's my fault that Vanellope is a glitch._

_It's my fault that there's malware in my head trying to take over me…_

_It's all my fault…all my…_

Turbo’s chair struck the sugar-cube tiles below him with a deafening clatter, loud enough that he’d probably cracked the floor if not the chair. He wasn’t thinking about that. He wasn’t thinking about the tears streaking down from his eyes, or the words that he was screaming at the top of his lungs. The potential for any kind of thought had been smothered by anguish.

“I _know_ it’s all my fault!” he shouted, glitching all over, so tense that he was drawn up on the tips of his toes. “I _know_ , okay?! You don’t have to _tell_ me! I ruined _everything_ , because I’m just _like_ that, and I’ve _always_ been like that! I don’t care if you hate me, because I deserve it – go ahead and yell at me, hit me, do whatever you want, I have it coming! But you could still never hate me as much as _I hate myself right now_! Okay?! _Okay?!_ ”

His last sharp, hysterical word struck the air, leaving it ringing. Ralph's furious expression instantly melted into shock and confusion, and he took several stumbling steps back.

Everyone was staring at Turbo, just like they had on the day that he first woke up after his reset. It made him feel now like it had back then: _I’m not welcome here. They never wanted me here in the first place. I’m worse than a ghost boy to them – I’m nothing but pure evil._

With a particularly severe glitch, he tore away from the table and ran, not stopping despite his various pitfalls and stumbles. He just barely heard the silence break as he pounded his way across the kitchen:

"Ralph!" cried Felix, and his voice contained actual anger.

"W-what? I didn't know that he would – OUCH!" Ralph's exclamation of pain coupled with the sharp sound of skin slapping against skin suggest that Calhoun had delivered a smack to somewhere on the villain's person.

"Are you happy now, Ralph?!" shouted Vanellope, and now there was a note of hysteria in her voice as well, making her words rise in pitch and urgency. "You’ve been against Turbo from day one, so are you happy now that you made him _cry_?! We’ve all had a hard day, but you don't see us losing our tempers and yelling at him! How do you think  _he_  must feel about this?!"

"He's  _fifteen_ , Ralph! For the love of Pete, he's  _a child_!" seethed Calhoun. "He is not that psycho wackjob of a corrupted king anymore, and he hasn't been for a month now, so  _stop treating him like he is_!"

Then they were out of earshot and Turbo was still running, lurching his way down the hall, until he finally reached his bedroom and slammed the door shut behind him.

Every breath razed at his lungs and throat; his ears were ringing. To be alone and in the dark after the nonstop movement of the day was more disorienting than he’d anticipated. For several moments, he found himself staring at the door as if he wasn’t sure what it was; then, hesitantly, he took a few shuffling steps towards his bed.

His foot crunched in something, and he reacted as if a firing squad had suddenly unloaded their ammo at him. Only when the glitches had subsided did he look down to see what he’d stepped on: it was the photo of him with Jet and Set, the one that he’d knocked over in his excitement to get to the Random Roster Race. The picture frame had shattered beneath his sneaker.

He looked at the flat smiles in the picture, and he remembered the day that the photo had been taken, when he never would have imagined that he’d end up in a situation like this. He thought of Jet and Set’s faces when saw them for the last time on his way to ruin all of their lives, and he thought of the other lives that he had ruined, of the characters that were dead, of the characters that had been abused, and how could someone who looked so happy in the picture stoop low enough to do something like that…?

Turbo was bawling before his thoughts even had a chance to snap out of their broken circle. He staggered backwards, somehow managed to land on the bed, and spiraled downwards into an abyss of guilt and grief. Coherency had been pushed out of his head entirely; he didn’t even have enough sense left to try and cover his face. He just sat there, wailing, finally losing his grip as the night's burden became far too much for him to support.

He wasn't sure how long he stayed there, crying alone and in the dark, fingers digging into his marshmallow pillow so deeply that he would probably leave permanent imprints come the morning, when someone pushed his bedroom door open just a crack. "Someone" was Vanellope. She took a moment to stare at him, at how he had been reduced to a broken and miserable heap coiled up on the sponge cake mattress, and then she lifted herself onto the bed and curled up beside him. There were tears dripping down her own face, although she was silent, unlike him. She didn't try to get him to stop crying or tell him that everything would be fine; she just lay there, pressed against his shaky and glitchy body in a position that couldn't have possibly been comfortable for her, and squeezed his hand every now and then as if to assure him that she wasn’t going anywhere, until eventually his breakdown began to quiet and subside.

Back in the days when Turbo Time had been operational and his biggest problem had been getting called a ghost boy, Turbo had cried sometimes, but only when he was sure that he was alone and Jet and Set wouldn't find him. Even then, his tears were typically accompanied by sniffles rather than sobs and only lasted long enough for a few minutes of self-pity. He had certainly never cried himself to sleep before…but that was exactly what happened now, and it seemed a fittingly depressing way to end one of the most horrible days of his life. With Vanellope still balled up at his side and countless new tanks of nightmare fuel ready to be set alight in his brain, he cried until he no longer had any tears to shed, and his exhaustion crept up and enveloped him before his eyes had even properly dried.

It was all his fault; he had no one to blame but himself. And that was what made it so hard to cope with.


	14. The whole arcade's Bad Guy

_“Vanellope…hey, kid, it’s time to wake up…”_

_“Nnnghh…she’s not here right now. Please leave a message after the beep…”_

_“Sorry, President Fart-feathers, I know you had a long night, but you really do have to wake up now.”_

_“Hnn…Ralph?”_

_“Yeah, it’s me. Now c’mon, you gotta get up. Since the Random Roster Race never happened last night, yesterday’s avatars have to do a repeat run, and that includes you.”_

_“Wait…last night – ”_

_“Yeah.”_

_“Everything that happened…oh, no…shouldn’t I stay with Turbo?”_

_“He’ll be okay for now. Look, he’s sleeping. By the time he wakes up, the arcade will probably be closed already.”_

_“Mm…I guess so. Ralph?”_

_“Yes, kid?”_

_“You need to apologize.”_

_“Yeeaahhh…okay, I’m sorry.”_

_“Not to me! To him!”_

_“I will, I will! But, y’know, I can’t do it until after he wakes up, can I?”_

_“No, I guess not. Okay, look out gamers, here I come.”_

_“At least tomorrow’s Sunday. You’ll be able to catch up on your rest.”_

_“…What are we going to do now, Ralph?”_

_“I really wish I knew…”_

* * *

 

He couldn’t tell if he was hearing an actual conversation, or just dreaming one up as a sort of intermission for his nightmares. He found it difficult to care either way; he was just so _tired_ , and his normally lightweight body felt as if it had been filled with cement. All he wanted was to roll over and go back to sleep for the next year or three, and he would have done it, too, if he’d had enough strength to move.

Something was missing, though. Hadn’t there been some kind of warm bulk curled at his side throughout the night, staving off desolate loneliness, enabling him to return to sleep each time a nightmare sank its teeth into him? He could have sworn that –

_Vanellope_.

His eyes slitted open for just a moment, and while exhaustion had turned his vision blurry and shadowy, he thought that he could just make out a small figure slipping through the door. But he was in no condition to call out, or even question what he was seeing. Before he’d even truly woken up, he tumbled back down into the darkness…

* * *

 

Turbo jolted into awareness five seconds later, or so it seemed to him. Someone had drawn back the blackout curtains in his bedroom, and just beyond the window, he detected the sounds of go-karts traversing the landscape to the tune of Sugar Rush's signature J-Pop theme song. He sat up slowly, drawing his sleeve across his eyes. Sleep had left him feeling rather refreshed, which honestly surprised him. His vision was sharp and his head had cleared, but now that he was able to think more coherently, he found himself in a state of profound confusion. After everything that had happened to him last night, he had no idea what to do with himself.

There would be no more glitch lessons now, and no more hopes of becoming a racer in this game. After all, who in their right mind would be willing to race with the evil monarch who had reprogrammed their lives for fifteen years? He supposed that now that he knew the truth, he would basically be a bystander, living here without interacting with anyone besides Vanellope and the three adults who had reformatted him, forced to watch from afar that fun that everyone else was having. The concept made his stomach sink, but he knew that he had no right to complain. He didn't even deserve to have the hospitality that he'd been shown here, and everybody knew it.

It was just that...he'd so looked forward to being a real racer again...

He swung his legs over the side of the bed, exhaling in a long whoosh of air. Surprisingly, even all of this negative thinking wasn't bringing even the threat of tears to his eyes, and an odd, hollow serenity had settled over his heart. Of course, after last night, he was probably going to lack the capacity to cry for a while.

Turbo wrapped his arms around himself and stood up, deliberately making his way through the castle corridors. The place was deserted, as it always was during the day. It was bizarre to think that at this time yesterday, he had been practically bouncing off the walls with the anticipation of joining his first Random Roster Race, blissfully unaware of the fateful code recognition that would assail him when he tossed his coin into the winner's cup. Hard to believe that things could change so quickly.

Eventually, he made his way into the throne room, where he leaned over one of the area's many balconies and rested his chin in his crossed arms. The view was spectacular, and he could pick out the individual Sugar Rush avatars from his perch, like mobile multicolored sprinkles atop a vast and detailed birthday cake.

_That could have been me_ , he thought drearily.  _I could have been out there racing today. I wonder if the gamers would have liked me..._ He tried to assure himself that it probably would have been a waste of time anyway. After all, who would have wanted to play with a ghost boy?

The circling karts practically hypnotized him into a state of blissful unawareness, and he happily let go of all knowledge of who and where he was, at least for the moment. Around and around and around, and he stayed there for what might have been an hour, possibly a little more. He didn't even notice the thudding footsteps coming up behind him until the person responsible for the sound cleared their throat.

"Hey, kid," said Ralph.

Turbo's eyes widened momentarily, then immediately narrowed and darkened. He pointedly tilted his head away, refusing to look the Bad Guy in the face; there was no way that he was going to say a word to Ralph right now.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ralph sigh and rub the back of his neck with one gargantuan hand, face downcast. "I wanted to apologize for last night," he started.

Two responses occurred to Turbo immediately:  _apology not accepted_  and  _apologize for what?_ After all, it wasn't as if Ralph had actually said anything untrue, or made any false accusations. Instead, the estranged racer replied with, "Who put you up to this? Felix or Vanellope?"

"Both of them," Ralph admitted. "Though the kid beat him to the punch. But I would have done it on my own anyway, kid. I didn't...I wasn't trying to make you...y’know, freak out like that..."

Turbo bristled and spun on his heels to face the wrecker. Of course, the sight of a three-foot-tall glitchy weakling facing down an ape like Ralph was probably more comical than confrontational, but Turbo was not joking around. "You think I didn't already  _know_  that it was my fault?" he demanded coldly. "You think that I needed you to  _tell_  me that?!"

"No," answered Ralph quietly. "Look, I'm not gonna sit here and try to justify what I said. Last night was stressful for all of us. I lost my temper, and I never should have said those things to you after everything you'd been through yesterday, and I'm sorry."

Turbo, his fists tight, pushed past Ralph and began to stomp away, unsure if he wanted to hear this right now.

"Think about this, though," Ralph called after him. "You heard my story. You're not the only one who's ever game-jumped for a petty reason, is what I'm saying. I never wanted to admit it before, but it seems like the only difference between you and me is the  _almost_  stuff. I  _almost_  got my game unplugged, and I  _almost_  screwed everything up. If one thing had gone wrong or even a little differently, then I guess the whole arcade would see me as even worse than you."

"The  _almost_  makes the difference between the Good Guy and the Bad Guy," muttered Turbo testily. "And I'm a Bad Guy now. Like, the whole arcade's Bad Guy. And I know that there's nothing I can ever do to change it. Think about  _that_."

Ralph softened by almost imperceptible degrees. "I'll tell you what, kid. You were asleep for a long time, and the arcade just closed about twenty minutes ago. Go get washed up and get yourself something to eat, and then we can go meet everyone else at the Random Roster Race. We can work this out somehow. Besides, Vanellope'll be heartbroken if she doesn't see you there."

Turbo shut his eyes, steadying himself, and nodded. Nice mindless, menial tasks like getting ready and eating breakfast...he could handle that. A thought occurred to him, and he decided to voice it, figuring that Ralph owed him at least one request.

"Do you mind if I drive to the Royal Raceway?"

For probably the first time ever, Ralph offered Turbo a very slight smile. "Yeah, sure, why not?"

* * *

 

When he was behind the wheel of his new sugary T car, the one that he and Vanellope had so painstakingly constructed with the expectation that he'd be competing in some actual races, Turbo felt a little calmer and more grounded. This was where he was designed to be, after all, with a pair of goggles strapped over his face and his foot on the gas. He tore down the roads at top speed, as if he could wash away the reality of who he was with a good adrenaline rush. But when he arrived at the Royal Raceway and saw all of the other children setting up their confectionary vehicles, waiting in line to pay their entry fees, and generally socializing and hobnobbing with one another, he found himself beginning to falter again.

He sat in the Assorted Fans section next to tensely, ignoring the grown-ups’ concerned looks, keeping his limbs all bunched together as if he were trying to collapse in on himself. At this point, it really didn't matter if anybody recognized him or not, but he preferred to keep the number of horrified looks aimed at him to a minimum. He was so preoccupied with warily sweeping his eyes through the crowd of spectators that he hardly paid any attention to the race. He saw that Vanellope didn't win this one either, though. Apparently he wasn't the only one who was distracted.

Finally, the winners received their trophies, and he was beginning to think that he might actually manage to escape without causing a scene. They were waiting for Vanellope to come to the stands and meet them (the poor girl was getting hounded by many of the other racers, and Turbo could guess what they were questioning her about) when Taffyta Muttonfudge, Rancis Fluggerbutter, and Candlehead strode up to them purposefully.

Taffyta, who seemed to be the leader of the trio, pulled the ever-present strawberry lollipop out of her mouth. It took Turbo several long seconds to come to the uncomfortable realization that they were staring right at him.

"So...you’re Turbo," remarked Taffyta dryly, her mascara-heavy eyelashes lowering over her eyes.

Turbo's breath hitched, and every muscle in his body immediately clenched. Beside him, Felix and Calhoun exchanged a look, and Ralph’s expression abruptly lost the relaxation that it had been gaining by degrees during the race. “This isn’t a good time, kids,” he announced in what was almost a warning tone.

But Turbo shook his head and stood up, still tense, but too drained to feel any kind of intimidation. If the Sugar Rush racers wanted to stare at him, well, let them get a good, long look. "What do you want?" he asked flatly.

Rancis crossed his arms. "Is it true that you don't remember anything from when you were King Candy?"

"Do you think I would still be here if I did remember?" Turbo frowned, and static rippled across his torso in a splash of red. He wouldn't have taken notice of such a minor disturbance, but all three of the children gasped, as if he were some sort of freak show attraction.

"You're a  _glitch_?" asked Taffyta incredulously.

"I..." Another strand of 1s and 0s flashed across his face, answering her query before he could formulate anything to say.

Candlehead pointed at him emphatically, squealing, "He  _is_  a glitch!" Turbo had no idea why they were making such a big to-do of it. He had gotten more than used to his glitching by now and no longer saw it as anything to make a fuss about, and besides, these three had always lived alongside Vanellope, and she'd been a glitch for longer than him! Unless they found this remarkable because –

_Oh_...

His worst fears were confirmed when Taffyta declared, "Well, it serves him right, if you ask me!" She twirled her lollipop between her fingers. "After he duped all of us and tried to get rid of Vanellope, let’s see how _he_ likes being a glitch!"

Turbo felt himself freeze, his code sputtering as it often did when he was under pressure. He was hardly aware of Ralph sending a sharp glance in Taffyta's direction. But the girl didn't notice, because at that moment, her attention was drawn to another voice interrupting, "Quit callin’ him a glitch like it’s a bad thing, Taffyta. I run the game now, and I don’t care if any of my subjects have a little pixlexia."

The trio parted and allowed Vanellope to stride through, their eyes wide and shameful as they figured out that they'd done something to upset the president. Vanellope's shoulders were a little droopier than usual, and there was a frazzled, distant expression lurking behind her puckered frown, informing Turbo that she hadn't completely recovered from yesterday’s events. But she still had enough spunk left in her to shoo her three friends away before scampering through the bleachers and flinging her arms around him.

He returned the hug tightly, willing himself not to cling too much. He couldn't believe how much he'd missed her even when they'd only been parted for a few hours. The thought of facing anything without her, even what should have been a normal boring day, didn't sit well in his still-vulnerable mind.

"Heya, Vanny," he murmured, shutting his eyes contentedly. "How's it going?"

"Pretty okay, 'Bo." She smiled up at him, looking indescribably relieved that he was more or less all right. "I missed you."

"I missed you too."

"Don't mind what those guys said, okay?" She glanced over her shoulder, watching Taffyta, Rancis, and Candlehead rejoin the other racers. "They're a little nervous. Everybody is."

Turbo shrugged. "I don't care if they call me a glitch," he responded honestly. "It's what I am, and there are a lot worse things to be. Like a former evil dictator who can't even remember everything he did wrong..."

"That's all over now, Turbo." She sighed. "You're not who you were. You're not King Candy anymore."

"Maybe not, but..." His gaze wandered anxiously across the crowded raceway, including the grown-ups, who were watching them the way that doctors might watch psychiatric ward patients. "Look, do you think that we could talk about this somewhere else? I get the feeling that I'm not wanted here, anyway."

She nodded understandingly and scampered over to Ralph. "Hey, Stinkbrain, can me and Turbo take a walk? We'll just circle the raceway. It'll take like ten minutes."

Ralph's eyebrows crinkled with concern. "Are you sure that’s a good idea, kid? If anyone sees you – ”

“Let them go for a while, Wreck-It,” interjected Calhoun, and Felix nodded in agreement. “They need a little breathing room.”

“I guess a ten-minute walk couldn't hurt,” conceded Ralph. “But  _only_  ten minutes, you understand? Otherwise, I'm gonna have to assume that you're getting chased by a Cy-bug and come after you."

"There aren't any Cy-bugs here anymore," she scoffed, grabbing Turbo's sleeve. "Come on, Pajama Boy, let's go. We'll be right back!"

"Ten minutes!" repeated Ralph sternly as he watched them dart off.

Vanellope headed for the grove of candy cane trees that bordered the Royal Raceway on one side, tugging Turbo along behind her like a dog on a leash. He found himself jogging to keep up with her, hampered by his lethargic and listless body. "Slow down, glitter-graphics!" he panted.

"No, you speed up!" she retorted, but she dug her heels into the ground to bring herself to a halt. "Are you sure you're okay? Even you aren't normally this slow."

"I'm as okay as I can be. I'm just...I'm not all there yet, I guess." He sighed and brought a hand up to his forehead. "This has been a lot to take in."

"Yeah, and I bet Taffyta getting all pretty-pink-pony-princess on you wasn't helping, either." She rolled her eyes. "She’s my friend and she’s pretty cool, but I think that strangers sort of freak her out, because she gets a little weird around people she doesn’t know. Well, you'll show her when you get on the track and whoop her hiney, am I right?"

He stopped up short, blinking. "What? Vanny, you know I can't race now!"

"Hey, that's quitter talk!" she scolded. "I didn't give you glitch training for a month just to see you throw it all away like this, y’know!"

"But if I even try to enter the Random Roster Race, it will put... _his_  name up on the board!" Turbo shuddered to himself. "And that's the last thing we want to happen."

"We'll figure something out," she promised, making a visible effort not to let her confidence falter. "You're gonna be a real racer, I just know it. After all, we can't keep the greatest racer ever away from the competition for long, can we?"

He dredged up a smile, recalling the days when he had declared himself the very best of the best without the barest inkling of doubt in his mind. Even after RoadBlasters was plugged in, he'd been certain that  _he_  was the one who deserved the attention and admiration of the gamers, no matter how much of a ghost boy he appeared to be on the outside. But ever since his reset, his life had been so much more tentative and unsure.

"For now, you just need to lighten up," Vanellope continued. "You know, do something to take your mind off things. So think fast, Pajama Boy!"

"Wha – "

Before he had a chance to react, she had tackled him to the ground, cackling delightedly. "Hey!" he cried out, squirming beneath her. "C'mon, I'm not really in the mood for this right now!"

"That's just too bad, Pajama Boy," she told him in a mockingly sad tone of voice. "Hmm...you know, I haven't actually seen you take off your helmet, like, ever...you even sleep with it on!"

His yellow eyes became round and mortified. "...m-my helmet?"

"Yeah, what are you hiding under there?"

"Uh, nothing – !" He started to thrash against her more insistently, hoping to break free, but apparently he wasn't even strong enough to free himself from the clutches of a tiny-nine-year old girl.

She kept him pinned effortlessly, smirking. "Nothing? We'll just see about that!" With one swift movement, she reached down and pried the helmet from his head, and...

"...pffffftahahahahaha!" Vanellope fell back laughing, enabling him to sit up with a sour scowl on his face. "I guess you were telling the truth, Turbo! There really is nothing under there! Ahahahaha!"

Turbo rolled his eyes, lifting a head to his barren scalp. He always felt incomplete without his helmet, especially since his developers hadn't bothered to give him any hair. "Yeah, yeah."

"I guess I got a new name for ya now! Baldy!"

"Yeah, never heard that one before – "

"I mean, you're fifteen and bald, that's just...hahahaha!"

"I get it, glitter-graphics! It's not that funny!"

"Do I get to make a wish if I rub your head?" She ran her hands all over his scalp experimentally, then planted a sloppy kiss right at the very top of his forehead. "Mwah!"

He groaned. "Okay, okay, okay! Now gimme back my helmet!" He bucked her off with a gentle, playful shove, then retrieved his helmet from where she had left it, securing it firmly over his head. She was still giggling audibly behind him, and he had to admit that he was beginning to feel better now.

" _Aww, having fun, Turbo?"_

Turbo gasped, the half-smirk instantly vanishing from his face when he heard the malicious voice speak. "Oh, no! Not again!" he choked out.

Vanellope tilted her head. "Uh, 'Bo, is something wrong?"

He had already doubled over, squeezing his hands against his head as the entity entrapped within began to mince words with him.  _"You must be having such a nice time with your little glitch friend! But you didn't forget about ME, did you? I told you that I'd always be here, and I meant it..."_

His head was pounding torturously, and trembles and glitches broke out all along his body. "Go away!" he shouted, oblivious to Vanellope's jaw dropping open behind him. "Leave me alone! I don’t want to talk to you and I don’t want to hear anything you have to say!"

Vanellope gasped. “Oh, no – it’s happening again, isn’t it…?!”

" _Didn't you think that maybe I might like to play, too?"_ the voice pressed, as if Turbo had never spoken.  _"Especially with little Vanellope, hoo-hoo-hoo! She and I didn't get to finish our conversation yesterday, thanks to you so rudely interrupting us..."_

"NO! Leave her ALONE!" howled Turbo desperately, his hands clamped over his ears. He had no idea how Vanellope was going to react to this, but he hoped that she was smart enough to start running. Already, he felt the rogue entity straining to seize control of his body again.

" _Hmm. It seems like I may have overstayed my welcome, isn’t that right? I sup-POSE that I could move on from here, especially since you didn’t, ahoo, APPRECIATE my offer to help you. Poor confused Turbo doesn’t recognize a good deal when he sees one! Maybe I ought to give it up and get my own body instead…"_

"Just get out!" he wailed, sick of the tormenting, sick of the teasing. His knees were quaking violently beneath him. "Get out of my head!”

" _Oh...gladly_."

And then the real pain began.

Turbo screamed, a pure animal sound of desperation and agony, and collapsed to the hard fudge ground. He was no longer glitching; now he had almost entirely dissolved into static, until he was a rough humanoid-shaped approximation of a character constructed from mangled code, as his scream tapered off into a gasp. Whatever was happening, whatever attack the malware version of him had launched, it was beyond excruciating. Sharp claws raked and stabbed at his very programming, and he writhed and jolted in the onslaught, unable to tear free. He thought that King Candy's cruel laughter might have been echoing throughout his brain, but he could hardly hear anything over the roar of raging malfunctions in his ears, and flashing red binary dominated his vision.

There was a final, terrible wrench, as if something were ripping itself out of his coding; then...

…it was over.

And Vanellope was shrieking in horror.

The pain became a throbbing soreness all over his body, and a breath of air hissed between his teeth. He had landed face-up, in a tangled heap of glitching arms and legs, his face dampened by tears of exertion and agony. The oblivious sun glared down on him cheerfully, magnifying his piercing headache.

"V...Va..." He made the immense effort to lift his head, needing to call out for Vanellope, to tell her that he’d been hurt somehow and that she had to go find help. She had stopped shrieking, but now he couldn’t hear her at all, and the light made it impossible to tell where she’d gotten off to. He opened his eyes as his neck slowly, shakily swiveled upwards...

...and found himself staring at the sadistically huge smile of King Candy.


	15. Who we are

"Ah, it feels so good to be back!" cackled King Candy, tugging the lapels of his plum-colored tailcoats and flexing his hands as if readjusting to his body. He was an exact duplicate of the jolly false monarch that Turbo had seen both on the racing video and in his nightmares, speaking in the same lispy singsong tones that had been whispering to him since his reset. The young racer felt himself go limp with shock, and his head dropped to the ground weakly. He was still unable to move, leaving him at the mercy of this  _thing_ , this creature, this malware in sheep's clothing.

_How did he even...?!_

Suddenly a hand yanked him upwards by the collar, almost choking him for a moment, and brought him uncomfortably close to the king’s face. Then, with the same strength that had dangled Vanellope on the bridge yesterday, King Candy hurled Turbo against a candy cane tree. His helmet struck the bark with a loud crack, and he winced, sliding weakly down the trunk.

Next thing he knew, some kind of rod was slamming into his side, knocking the breath out of him. King Candy had produced a red-and-white striped cane from somewhere (oh, of course, a CANDY CANE, ha ha, it would be hilarious if it weren’t so painful) and Turbo rolled over to try and avoid the second blow, but his shaky body ended up sprawled across the ground. Looming over him, King Candy grinned and held up his cane as if it were a sword, obviously wondering whether or not he should impale his other half with it…

 _Clunk!_ The king’s smile dissolved, and he spun around wildly as something careened off the back of his head. He’d been struck by some kind of rock, a jawbreaker or a chocolate chunk or something; Turbo couldn’t tell exactly what it was, but he knew exactly who had thrown it. Vanellope stood glaring at King Candy, fists curled and feet apart, like a wrestler preparing to tackle an opponent.

Sunlight glinted off of the insanity in King Candy’s eyes, and panic stabbed into Turbo as he thought for certain that Vanellope was about to get torn apart. But then the king grinned broadly in a way that Turbo knew very well. It was the enormous, toothy, perfectly symmetrical grin that he used to plaster over his face during gaming hours in Turbo Time – sweet as sugar and false as saccharine.

“Look at _this_!” crooned King Candy, advancing towards her with his arms spread wide and his cane dangling between his fingertips. “The three of us, finally together again! I feel like it’s been so long – you remember, hoohoo, _last_ time, when you ruined _all my plans_ with your glitch, and then your _REPULSIVE_ friends boiled me alive just when I was starting to get my footing?”

“I remember,” replied Vanellope flatly, and with more courage than Turbo could have summoned in a million years.

“Good, I’m so _glad_!” That overbearing parody of delight – King Candy could have taken lessons from the bullies who used to mock Turbo openly, and in a way, maybe he had. “At least _someone_ here remembers.” With a disdainful sneer, he jabbed his foot into the base of Turbo's ribs, ensuring that the teen couldn't suck in enough air no matter how hard he gasped. As he struggled for breath, Turbo noticed dimly that there was a jingle ball dangling from the edge of King Candy's shoe. If there really was someone in control of fate, then they must have had a sick, disturbing sense of humor.

“Leave him alone!” cried Vanellope, rushing at King Candy in a rush of rage and horror, but he snagged her by the hood and flung her away like a softball. She skidded against the ground, stunned but unhurt.

 _So strong,_ thought Turbo dimly, his lungs still heaving for air. _It doesn’t make any sense. If he came from me, how could he possibly be that strong…?_

“This is pa- _thetic_ ,” King Candy jeered down at him. “I get taken out of action for a few weeks, and here you are, consorting with the enemy and choking like a fish out of water! I can’t _believe_ that I was ever so pitiful.”

Vanellope glitched to her feet, apparently not wanting to waste a few precious seconds getting up the normal way. “I said, _LEAVE HIM ALONE!_ ”

Somehow, Turbo sensed the change in the corrupted king’s expression, more than he actually saw it through his wavering vision – and while he couldn’t describe it, it made him shudder nonetheless. He thought desperately, _He looks like an old man, and maybe he was only as strong as an old man last time Vanny saw him, but something’s different now. She’s going to get close to him and he’s going to do something we haven’t seen before and he’s going to kill her._

He opened his mouth to shout a warning, but he was all out of breath.

An endless moment stretched out in which Vanellope was poised to strike, and King Candy was coolly waiting for his opportunity to counterattack. Turbo’s oxygen-starved brain struggled to keep him from blacking out, because he needed to see who would move first, to make sure that Vanny would be okay…

And then a bludgeon-like fist came swinging out of nowhere, connecting directly with the king.

King Candy released a short exclamation of surprise and pain as he was promptly flung several yards away by the force of the impact. Suddenly Turbo’s lungs were working again, and he gulped down a huge gasp of air, blinking away dark spots in his vision just enough to take in the face of his savior.

It was Ralph.

"Stay away from them!" roared the wrecker, holding his immense hands high above his head like a rabid gorilla. Now that the appendages were clenched and tensed in all their boxy glory, Turbo could see them for what they really were: weapons, meant for destroying things –  _wrecking_  things. Despite his fatigue, his jaw dropped open. He had seen Ralph get protective and he'd seen him get angry, but never anything like this.

“Ralph!” shouted Vanellope, and she did something that Turbo hadn’t seen her do in all the time he’d been here: she rippled with a tiny glitch of shock.

King Candy dragged himself to his feet, shooting a glare in Ralph's direction. His eyes were murderous, brimming with malice, and yet his mouth was still stretched into that goofy clown grin. "Well, milk my duds!" he proclaimed. "Wreck-It Ralph is here! All we need is Fix-It and that, that _vicious_ woman in the black armor, and this will be a proper reunion, don't you think?"

Ralph's face was twisted into an indescribable expression of rage. "If you so much as lay a finger on those kids, then I will tear you  _limb from limb_ , you candy-coated psychopath!" he bellowed, advancing on the little old man with his fists at the ready.

"I'd like to see you try!" scoffed King Candy. His fingers had curled and crooked strangely, as if beginning a transformation into claws. "I may look like that simperingly sweet king, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve now! Access to all my add-ons, courtesy of a certain Fix-It’s tinkering!"

“ _Kids, get BACK!”_ bellowed Ralph, and he charged forward hard enough to make the ground shake.

Turbo’s breathing was only just going from desperate to ragged when Vanellope seized his arm. “C’mon, Bo, you gotta get up!” she told him urgently, dragging him to his feet. “We’re getting out of here!”

" _Ullp_..." Turbo made a low gasping noise as his vision dissolved into a blur of indistinct colors, as if the entire world was being softened around the edges by a graphics error. A splash of red pixels rolled through him like a shiver, and he winced, his code still sore from King Candy's exit earlier. He knew that they had to run, but he wasn’t even sure that he could make his legs work long enough to walk.

Meanwhile, Ralph had delivered another pummeling blow to the king, who skidded along the ground with a pained hiss. He raised his hands as if to fight back, but before Turbo could see what he might be planning to do, he found himself stumbling through the candy cane forest behind Vanellope. Every step made him feel a little closer to falling, and he fought the heaviness in his limbs with everything he had. _I can’t stop, he could be coming after us any second, it’s not safe, I can’t stop, can’t…_

Someone emitted a wordless yell, most likely Ralph, but Turbo was too muzzy-headed by this point to tell for certain. His eyelids nuzzled against his cheeks.

Vanellope was forced to stop moving as he sagged against her, practically a dead weight. Her eyes flared wide. “Turbo, what’s wrong?!”

“I think it’s my code,” murmured Turbo. “I felt…something…when he was taking form. There must be…gaps…oh, no.”

“Pajama Boy…!”

But he couldn’t hear her anymore. By that point, he had already fainted.

* * *

 

When Turbo came to, his mind stirring slowly within the depths of unconsciousness, the first thing he heard were voices so indistinct that they might or might not have been auditory hallucinations. Maybe he was dreaming; the world’s soft, out-of-focus feeling seemed to support this hypothesis. But the hard surface beneath him, so unlike his sponge cake bed, felt uncomfortably solid and real…

Then the panic assaulted him, scratching and stabbing recollections of the events that had just occurred, taunting mental images of King Candy and echoing reminders of the pain that he had experienced. He cried out in horror, his body beginning to buck and jolt, tremors and glitches spreading across the surface of his skin like a truckload of boulders dumped into a pond and rippling the still waters. "No...n-no – !"

Instantly, hands of various shapes and sizes were all over his arms and shoulders, which almost made him panic more – until he realized that they were comforting, not grabbing.

“Hey kid, take it easy…”

“Are you all right?!”

“You’re safe now…!”

Turbo's eyes snapped into focus. He was on the ground, legs bent awkwardly, in the exact same copse of trees that he’d collapsed in. Gathered around him were Ralph, Felix, Calhoun, and Vanny, the latter crouching at his side. He panted, struggling to catch his breath. "W-wha...where did he..."

"He got away," answered Ralph grimly. "But we'll get him later. And he’s not gonna get very far if he tries anything while we’re all here."

"Jiminy jaminy, are you okay, kiddo?!" fretted Felix, slapping a hand over the racer's forehead as if feeling for a fever. "You scared us all something awful…!"

"Yeah, you freaked me out when you went down like that!” scolded Vanellope. "I thought that maybe you'd...you know..."

He shook his head, grateful that he had at least regained enough strength to move. "Nah, I'm okay, Vanny. I just passed out, that's all."

Felix shook his head in bewilderment. “Are you _sure_ you’re okay? He didn’t hurt you…?”

"Not on the outside," replied Turbo, his voice slightly shaky. “But I think that my code got a little screwed up, when he first…” He trailed off, suddenly realizing that the incredulous way that the grown-ups were staring at him didn’t just have to do with the fact that he’d fainted.

“So,” Calhoun started slowly, “would one of you kids like to explain what the _fun_ just happened?”

Ralph nodded in agreement. "I mean, that was definitely King Candy. Same body, same voice, and same craziness too. But Turbo and King Candy are supposed to be the same person, so…how is this even possible?”

Turbo pushed himself up, staring obstinately at the tips of his sneakers instead of at anyone’s eyes. “He, um…he sort of split off from me.”

Calhoun raised an eyebrow. "What do you mean, split off from you?"

Vanellope took the chance to chime in. "Turbo and were going for our walk, just playin' and stuff, and then all of a sudden, he grabbed his head and started talkin' to himself. And then he got really, really glitchy, and he fell on the ground, and a big staticky thing came out of him and when it cleared up..." She held out her arms for emphasis. "Boom! King Candy."

Felix was shaking his head back and forth at a slow, plodding pace. "I don't understand...how could this happen...?"

"Uh," said Turbo. He did have a theory, but it was not a reassuring one, and it would also involve him doing the very thing that Vanellope had warned him not to do last night. But more than his own skin was at stake now. If there was even a minuscule chance that it would prevent a disaster, he had to tell the entire truth.

"Felix, about those add-ons and malware that you said you separated from me,” he started cautiously. “Would the King Candy character model be included in that, by any chance?"

The handyman dipped his head in a hesitant nod. "Yes, I believe so.”

"Then I think that the rest of the malware kind of...grew a brain, I guess, and ran off in King Candy's body. That's why it split off from me. Now it can move around and act like a character, so it can go anywhere it wants to.”

Felix's breath hitched.  “Is that possible?” He looked up, seeking guidance from Calhoun, the one with the most expertise regarding malware.

"Yes,” she pronounced through stiff lips. “It’s possible. But it’s not supposed to just _happen_ like this – there should have been some  _warning_! Malware can’t just start thinking for itself in an instant. If it’s been inside you for the past month, then there would have been signs, you would have known…"

Turbo's eyes fluttered downwards guiltily. "I did," he murmured.

"Excuse me?" said Calhoun sharply.

"I've heard King Candy's voice in my head since...well, almost since I was first reset." He rested his face in his hands, feeling an all-too-familiar sense of guilt surge up within him again. "At first I didn't even know what I was hearing. It just sounded like somebody laughing next to my ear, or saying  _remember, remember_ , and it was really quiet and didn't happen that often and I basically just didn't pay attention to it. A lot of times it happened right after I woke up from a nightmare, anyway, so I figured that it was just part of the dream. Or an auditory hallucination." That was a larger phrase than he was used to speaking, and the words lisped a bit on his tongue:  _auditory halluthination._ "But then yesterday, after I found out the truth about my past, he really started talking to me. And he...he..."

"Turbo!" hissed Vanellope, shooting him a desperate warning look.

Turbo gritted his teeth and braced himself to continue. There could be no more falsehoods now; this was the time for truth. "He got control of my body. When Vanellope came and found me on the Rainbow Bridge, he used me to grab her and tried to push her off. I-I couldn't do anything, I swear I couldn't! And I finally managed to push him back and she was okay, and I didn't hear anything more from him until today, when he..."

The three adults were all exchanging stupefied glances, their pupils constantly shifting back and forth from one another, to Vanellope, to Turbo. "Why didn't you say anything before?" asked Ralph flatly.

Turbo continued looking down, unwilling to rat out Vanellope, unable to explain his own misgivings about trusting other people that had led him to follow her advice. "I..."

"Was it because you didn't want to get in trouble? Is that it?" Ralph rubbed the base of his beefy palm against his forehead, and Turbo was distressed to see that the wrecker's face was darkening in a telltale way. And here he'd thought that they were actually making progress... "Kid, you put both yourself and Vanellope in danger just because you were afraid of being punished?! Look, you're not a bad kid and I don't hate you or anything, but sometimes I really question your decision-making skills! Like leaving your game in the first place! You were the most popular game in the arcade back then, and you were the hero and the lead character, you clearly had a good thing going! Why would you even do that?!"

Turbo bristled, an angry glitch zipping through his tiny frame as he sprang to his feet. All right, he was  _done_  with Ralph constantly bringing this up. Stretching himself upwards, his entire body pulled taught, he shouted, " _Because I was being a stupid, selfish, snot-nosed little kid, okay?!"_

Stunned silence dropped over the others.

Shoulders heaving tensely, words hissing between gritted teeth, Turbo continued, "Do you really think that I'm happy about where my choices have gotten me?! This is not what I wanted! I never thought that any of this would happen! Yes, I went into RoadBlasters because I was jealous, and I shouldn't have done it, okay?! I was  _wrong_! But was it really so bad that I was trying to impress the only people who’d ever cared about me – who’d ever understood me – who’d ever thought of me as more than just a ghost boy?! Because that's all I was, for my entire life! Do you remember that, Ralph?! Do you remember seeing me get picked on almost every time I went to Tappers, or pushed around in Game Central Station, or constantly getting mocked because people just thought of me as a dumb kid and nothing else?! Okay, maybe I was too touchy. Okay, maybe the teasing really shouldn't have been that big of a deal! But for most of my life...I really did feel like I was just a ghost boy."

He dropped to his knees, feeling drained by the outburst. "Just a ghost boy," he repeated. "Like I was barely there at all. No one could ever see me…"

His head drooped, so he didn't see it as Ralph's expression gradually softened like butter melting in the sun...then spread into a small but genuine smile.

"You know what, Turbo? I may not remember anything about what you were like about then – but I still know exactly where you’re coming from.” He reached out and placed two fingers on Turbo's shoulders, so as not to press too much weight onto the boy, and Turbo gave a slight glitch of surprise. "Look, you made a mistake. And it was a pretty big one. But every single character in this whole arcade has done something stupid that they regretted later, including me. And making a mistake doesn't make you a dumb kid or a ghost boy...it just makes you human."

Turbo blinked, and his eyes lifted to meet Ralph's face.

"Besides, you're doing something right now that a lot of people  _never_  work up the courage to do," Ralph went on. "You're taking responsibility for your actions. You're admitting that what you did was wrong. I think that's pretty... _mature_  of you."

"...you do?" asked Turbo incredulously.

Ralph nodded, this time smiling widely enough to display the gap between his front teeth. "Yup."

Felix lowered himself into a sitting position beside Turbo. "What was the real reason why you didn't tell us about King Candy, kiddo?"

"Because...I was scared." Turbo exhaled shakily. "Scared that if you thought I was gonna turn bad again, then you'd just decide to get rid of me…” He neglected to mention that it was Vanellope who had put this idea into his head.

Felix's baby blue eyes became shockingly sad. "You really think that little of us? Turbo, we would never do something like that! You're a part of our family now, and no matter what happens next, we’re here to help you fix it.”

"I think I finally know that." Turbo steadied himself and flashed a brief smile at Felix, Calhoun, Ralph, and of course Vanellope, adding a barely perceptible dip of his head as his eyes connected with those of his best friend. "You guys  _are_  my family, and I believe that now. So I’ll do whatever you need from me to stop this. We've all gotta look out for each other, right?”

Vanellope fizzed a giggle into her hand. “Let’s go out and kick King Candy right in his puffy butt!”

"First things first, we should check the codes," Felix suggested. "Just so that we can make sure that your theory is correct, Turbo. That way we can find the best way to get rid of the malware."

"Can I go in?" inquired Turbo hopefully.

Felix seemed dubious. "Into the codes?"

"Well, yeah. It's my programming. I wanna see what you're doing in there."

"I suppose that's all right." Felix dragged a gloved hand along his chin. "Just don't touch anything! The code vault can be a dangerous place. We all learned that the hard way..."

* * *

 

All lead characters intuitively possessed the knowledge of where their game's respective code vault was located. For example, Turbo had always been aware in Turbo Time that there was a secret trapdoor in one of the bleachers that led to a cellar of sorts, where the central control pad was located. In keeping with this chain of information, Vanellope was the one who took the lead as the five of them strode into the throne room. She scampered up to the area's centerpiece, the royal go-kart throne itself, and pulled back the curtains that ringed the little alcove where it sat beneath its layer of dust. "This way," she instructed.

Turbo was the first one to duck beneath the fabric drape, and he immediately blinked as an unnaturally harsh, sterile light assailed his vision. He was now in a narrow stainless-steel hallway, its walls lined with cords and tubes of pulsing blue electricity. The space was so low-ceilinged that Calhoun had to practically bend over backwards in order to keep from bumping her head, and poor Ralph could barely cram himself inside at all. Turbo wasn't sure what he found more surprising: the high-tech futuristic décor, or the fact that there was actually a location within Sugar Rush that wasn't edible.

Several lengths of crimson licorice rope were coiled and neatly dangling from pegs, and Felix hoisted two of these rolls over his arm before hesitating. Ralph and Calhoun would never fit through the door, which left only three possible candidates to check things out. "Are you coming in, Vanellope?" he asked.

She shook her head. "I'll stay out, if you don't mind. It gives me the heebie-jeebies in there, even when there’s not malware floating around."

"That's fine. It'll be just you and me then, Turbo." Felix smiled faintly and tossed a rope in Turbo's direction. "Tie it around you like this." He demonstrated, securing the thick licorice around his abdomen and tying it in a tight knot.

Turbo obliged and looped the lifeline around his waist, familiar with how the tethering process worked. He had fiddled with the codes on a few occasions in Turbo Time, and it had always given him a chill tingle of excitement, coupled with the anxiety of the forbidden and unknown. Messing with the program was a bit like tinkering with illegal pyrotechnics: the beauty and thrill of the experience could make it all worthwhile, but just one stray spark might set the entire world aflame. Of course, he'd already screwed up everything here that it was possible to screw up, and this time he wasn't going to touch anything.

The hallway ended in a round portal with a control pad embedded into it, which Vanellope now scurried up to. "You don't remember the passcode, do you, Pajama Boy?" she called over to Turbo.

He shook his head. "No. How could I?"

"Just checkin'." With that, her chubby hand darted out and pressed a quick string of commands in sequence: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, START. The control pad rotated aside with a mechanical hiss, allowing them access to the black hole that was the entrance of the vault.

"I'll keep you secure, soldier," Calhoun promised, firmly grasping the edge of the licorice rope dangling from Felix's waist, and he pushed himself up into one of his platformer hops to give her a peck on the cheek.

"So will I," Ralph added. "Just be careful, both of you."

"We will, brother." Felix stepped up to the portal, tugging the knots in his lifeline one last time to ensure that they wouldn't be coming loose anytime soon. "Stay close to me," he warned Turbo, and with that, he pushed off into the void.

Turbo sucked in a deep breath, feeling a nervous glitch flick through him, and followed.

Gravity dropped away from him instantly, siphoning all of the weight from his body, and he paddled his arms in circles as he tried to adjust to the eerie sensation of being suspended in midair. At the same time his eyes, which glowed lemon yellow in the darkness, widened in awe at the breathtaking sight before him. Countless thousands of individual code modules – all bearing a label that told of their purpose, linked by a seemingly endless network of wires, alternating in different multicolored hues based on the different electricity currents flowing throughout the vault – were clustered in a gargantuan web. But he had no time to appreciate the view, as Felix was already propelling himself downwards, kicking his feet like a deep-water swimmer.

Turbo mimicked the handyman's movements and swam after him, treading the muggy, staticky air as if it were liquid. Felix's destination was a lonely rectangular code block set off to the side of all the other modules, although it still dangled between the mandatory minimum two connections. It looked weak and shivery, less able to hold its own then the other bits of programming around it. He only fully understood what he was looking at when the block sparked at both ends, spewing scarlet fireworks in a brief spray...at the very same time that he glitched.

"So that's my code?" he said, frowning as he dragged himself closer to the fragile substance that held him together. "It doesn't look very...sturdy."

"Well, it’s certainly seen better days after all you put yourself through, but it's strong enough, kiddo," Felix assured him. "It keeps you alive, after all. We even coded it in so that if you were ever involved in a racing accident or anything, you should technically be able to regenerate. But hold on...there's something else around back..." He narrowed his eyes suspiciously, moving around to a dark bulge protruding from the other side of the block.

As Turbo drew near, his breath froze in his throat, an instinctive sense of danger nearly causing him to glitch again. The unknown object was jagged and irregular, pitch black in color, and closely attached to his own module by dozens of suction cup-like appendages that grasped his code like tentacles. It looked like a parasitic tumor, trying to drain his life away from the base up. It bore no inscription to hint as to what it might be. "The malware!" he blurted out, frantically thrashing to push himself along.

"Oh my land," gasped Felix. "You were right, Turbo! Your old add-ons must have gotten access to the memories we removed! That explains why it acted the way you described..."

"What do you mean?"

"Our memories make us who we are, Turbo," explained Felix. "Our experiences impact our personalities in huge ways. As soon as we took out thirty years' worth of bitterness and hatred from your brain, you became someone completely different...a kid with a good heart. But this malware's memory is feeding it the images of your pain after the RoadBlasters incident, and the life you lived as King Candy here in Sugar Rush...”

“So it wants revenge,” whispered Turbo with a chill of understanding.

Felix nodded grimly. “In a sense, it thinks that it's you, but it isn't anyone, really. It's nothing more than malware."

"That doesn't make it any it any less scary," Turbo mumbled. He turned to Felix hopefully. "Can't we just delete it and get this over with?"

"Delete it?! Oh, heavens, no!" Felix wagged his head vigorously. "We don't know how much of you the malware has access to, and if we tried to destroy it, we might end up seriously hurting or even  _killing_  you!"

Turbo froze. "Wait...so if something happened to the King Candy malware, say it got killed in another game or something...it might bring me down with it?"

Felix spread his hands in front of him helplessly. "There's no way of knowing for sure, but yes, that unfortunately seems pretty likely to me."

"Then can't you just...fix it?" Turbo pointed to the trusty golden hammer dangling from its usual loop in Felix's tool belt, and Felix sighed and patted his sacred tool wistfully.

"If only it were that easy. I can't use my hammer to manipulate any out-of-game items. Trying to fix the code is like trying to escape into the players' world and fix their broken things for them; it just wouldn't work. When Vanellope and I reset your code, we had to do it all with our bare hands."

Turbo's eyes fell shut, and he allowed himself to drift gently in the zero-G airwaves of the vault for a moment. "Great. Well then, what are we supposed to d – "

A muffled clanking noise in the distance interrupted them.

Both characters' heads swiveled in unison to face the portal, which from here looked like a circle of searing white light among the gently pulsing luminescence of the codes. As they watched, shadows skittered across the faraway opening, moving at a frenzied pace. "What in the world...?!" cried Felix.

Turbo fearfully returned his gaze to the malware block. Was it just him, or did it seem to be getting sharper...blacker...even slightly  _bigger_  even as he continued to observe it? Whether it was really shifting or just an illusion of the light, there was one thing that he knew for certain, right down to his gut.

"He’s here," he whispered, throat dry, voice distorting from another glitch. “King Candy’s found us.”


	16. Glitches can't leave their games

"King Candy's here?!" cried Felix fearfully, his rosy cheeks whitening visibly in the twilight-indigo glow of the code vault. "But Tammy and Ralph are standing guard – how would he have managed to get past – ?!"

"I don't mean here in the code room, I mean here in the castle!" corrected Turbo. Electric self-preservation impulses were flicking to life up and down his spine, almost like glitches, but much more worrisome and panicky. "Maybe he's coming towards here, but...I don't know, I just know that he's  _close_! I can feel it! We're running out of time!"

Felix glanced again at the tumor-like malware embedded into Turbo's coding block, then nodded briskly. "And I guess you would know. All right, kiddo, hold my hand. We're getting out of here now." He grabbed Turbo's wrist with an unusually strong, protective grip and reached out into the darkness, tugging twice in quick succession on the licorice rope that kept them tethered. A second later, they were both gliding along, being pulled back towards the portal.

Calhoun was waiting for them there, first lifting in her husband as if he were a toddler. "Tammy, is everything okay out here?" he asked anxiously as he hurriedly picked at the knot in his tether.

"We don't know," she responded grimly, scooping Turbo out of the void. He felt more than a little disoriented as gravity dropped over him again, and he wobbled slightly on his feet when she placed him on the ground. "We just heard a loud noise out in the throne room.”

“I told you, we gotta go investigate!” exclaimed Vanellope.

Behind her, Ralph crossed his arms. “And I told _you_ , there’s no way. We can’t go running off into danger when we’re dealing with – ”

Another round of unpleasant sounds invaded their ears: first a voice was desperately pleading, but the words were indistinct; then there was a crash that sounded nasty enough to make all of them cringe; and finally, the unmistakable throbbing rumble of a revving engine could be heard,  _inside the building._

"What was that?!" yelped Vanellope.

Turbo tore the licorice rope from his waist. "This is bad!" he proclaimed, his body distorting with blotches of red pixels. "This is really, really bad!"

"Nobody panic!" shouted Felix, despite the fact that he wasn't looking particularly calm himself. He raised his hands above his head. "We're going out there. Kids, stay close to us at  _all times_. Tamora, would you..." But she was already clasping her pistol, and she moved into a defensive stance, positioning herself in front of both the younger members of the party and Felix. "All right then. Let's go see what we're up against..."

They must have looked like an unbelievably odd group as they crept back down the stainless steel hallway towards the throne room. Ralph took the lead, his fists clenched and at the ready, while Calhoun slunk behind him with all the deadly grace of a trained assassin. Felix brought up the rear, and even though he was hardly very intimidating, he had stretched out his arms as if to offer some protection to the more or less defenseless children; Turbo felt gratitude straining to come through his terror. This really was his family, and not only had they saved his life, but they were continuing to risk everything for him even now. He only wished that there was something that he could to do repay them for it.

At last, they reached the end of the corridor. Vanellope scampered around Ralph and Calhoun and ever so cautiously pulled back the curtain that led back into the normal area of the castle, and who should she find waiting for her but...

"Sour Bill!" she shrieked, dashing forward before any of the adults could stop her.

And indeed, the throne room was empty except for her droll green attendant, who was displaying an emotion other than apathy for the first time that Turbo could remember. The little guy had been slammed into the wall with such force that he'd left a Bill-shaped hole among the shortbread bricks, and now he was stuck there, frantically paddling his hands and feet as he tried to free himself. "P-President von Schweetz!" he stammered.

"Aww, Jeeves, what happened to ya?!" Vanellope scrambled over to help him, yanking his hands until he dropped from his perch into her arms. There were slender cracks in his hard candy surface, slight but still noticeable. "Who did this?!"

"I'm so sorry, Madame President!" he spluttered. "I tried to stop him, I really did, but he was too powerful for me! He attacked me before I could warn you!"

Calhoun stepped forward. "Who did?" she demanded, although her face revealed that she already had a theory about what his answer would be.

"K-King C-C-Candy!" Sour Bill practically blubbered.

Calhoun stiffened and exchanged a glance with Ralph, who exchanged a glance with Felix, who exchanged a glance with Turbo. Turbo exhaled shakily and lifted a hand to his head, glitching. His intuition had been correct, and if his current gut instincts were still representative of the future, then they were going to be in a quite a crunch trying to catch up with the false king. There was no way that the malware would waste any time in trying to infect the rest of the arcade...

"Where is he now?!" asked Ralph, eyes swinging around the room suspiciously.

"He left! He took the car!" Sour Bill pointed towards the throne alcove, and sure enough, the white chocolate royal go-kart was absent. Turbo hadn't even realized it when they'd all come through the curtains.

"So he's heading out, then." Ralph gave a muffled growl of frustration. "Probably getting ready to take over another game.”

"Well, we are not going to let him! Not by a long shot!" snarled Calhoun. "I've been dealing with viruses since the day my game was plugged in! If we can keep Sugar Rush from being overrun by a few hundred thousand Cy-Bugs, then we can certainly take down this miserable son of a gun who isn't even a real character! Fix-It, Wreck-It, let's  _go_."

Ralph cracked his knuckles. "I'm on it!"

Felix nodded grimly, before turning to Vanellope and Turbo. "All right, kids. Both of you need to stay here in the castle. You'll be safer that way."

"Um,  _what_?!" Vanellope's jaw dropped incredulously. "There's a horrible evil virus out for revenge against us who wants to take over the whole arcade, and we're just supposed to sit here and do  _nothing_?! Are you kidding me, Felix?!"

"No, young lady, I am not kidding you!" Felix crossed his arms in a stern, fatherly manner. "I am not just going to let you two throw yourselves into danger. There's no way that you can come with us – you could be killed!"

"Yeah, so could you!" she pointed out.

Turbo blinked and stepped forward, as if a daze had just peeled back from his mind. "Felix, I agree with Vanellope. This malware is my problem, and I need to be a part of the solution! Let us help you, I'm sure that there's  _something_  we can do – "

"No." Felix pressed a finger against the boy's lips, shaking his head sadly. "I care about the both of you too much...I could never forgive myself if something happened to you. Isn't that right, Ralph, Tammy?"

Calhoun set her lips into a firm line. Her expression had hardened, perhaps to form a concealing mask over the pain lurking beneath. "I've put my loved ones at risk before, and it only ended in tears," she stated. "Never again. I wouldn't be able to call myself a responsible sergeant if I let a couple of kids out in the middle of a battle like this. Honestly, I have some misgivings about  _you_  going, Fix-It."

"I'm an adult, ma'am," replied Felix somberly. "I may be a bit on the small side, but I'm still a grown man, and it just wouldn't be the gentlemanlike thing to stay here like a coward and let my lovely wife go get herself off into trouble."

She rolled her eyes, but a smirk was hovering at the corners of her lips.

"Ralphie, you'll let us go, won't you?" pleaded Vanellope, scampering up to the wrecker and tugging on his enormous fingers. Her hands didn't even wrap all the way around his thumb. "Please, please, please! Let us come with you! Let us fight!"

Turbo approached Ralph as well. "Look, I understand if you don't want Vanellope to go – "

"Hey!" she squealed in protest.

"But you have to at least let me!" Turbo clasped his hands together, staring up at Ralph with the widest, most begging eyes that he could muster up. "This malware only exists because of me! It's technically my problem, so don't I get a chance to go out there and set things right?!"

Ralph heaved a sigh. "Look, kid, even if I liked the idea, it's not possible. You can't get out of Sugar Rush no matter how much you want to."

Turbo opened his mouth, and then shut it.

"Yeah. Glitches can't leave their games." Ralph pushed a hand through his spiky auburn hair, and he actually didn't appear to be dismissive. He understood Turbo's point and genuinely seemed to feel bad that he couldn't give it more contemplation. "We've taken care of this guy before, Turbo, and we can do it again. After all, there's three of us and only one of him, and he's not even a giant Cy-Bug this time! Just...stay here with Vanellope and try to hang tight. You're better off where you are anyway."

And with that, all three grown-ups turned and made a beeline for the exit, Calhoun already unfolding her cruiser so that she could launch herself into flight the moment she got outside. With Sour Bill already dragging himself off to tend to his minor wounds, Vanellope and Turbo were left alone in the throne room, both of them at a loss for words.

Turbo clenched his fists bitterly, feeling a few miserable little glitches ripple through him. These people had taken him in, and since his reset, he had done nothing but infringe on their hospitality, unknowingly dredge up their bad memories of the past, and act like a selfish brat. And now there was a virus plotting to take over the entire arcade that only existed because of him, and he could do literally nothing about it because of his sputtery code! He aimed a harmless, ineffective kick at the wall without much energy. With all that had happened over the past few days, he'd nearly forgotten about that one nasty side effect of being a glitch that no amount of training could ever change.

Vanellope bit her lip. "We could always check around Sugar Rush to see if we can find him," she suggested in a vain attempt at optimism. "Maybe since he's attached to you, he can't leave the game, either!"

''I doubt it," he muttered glumly. "I was just lookin' at his code, and it didn't look like he was glitchy."

"Well, we have to do  _something_ , Turbo!" She stomped the licorice-lined sole of her boot on the ground. "I am not just gonna sit here, no matter what the grown-ups say! We might be kids and we might be glitches, but that doesn't make us totally useless!"

"I guess so..." Sometimes Turbo thought that Vanellope could hardly even call herself a glitch anymore, since she now had all of the perks (a short-range teleportation ability) but none of the drawbacks (having a limit on using that ability, glitching during high-stress situations, being trapped inside the game). Still, she  _had_ suffered from those effects without any compensation at all for years, and because of him, so it wasn't as if he could accuse her of not understanding his frustration. "It sure couldn't hurt to check out the rest of this game, anyway."

"That's the spirit. Come on, Pajama Boy, to the garage! You know this is better than doing nothing!"

_Better than doing nothing, maybe_ , he thought as he jogged along behind the energetic nine-year-old,  _but not much better_.

* * *

 

For once, slipping behind the wheel of his kart and taking a nice fast drive didn't relax him much, and his eyes were unusually somber behind their protective goggles. Vanellope led him through every twist and nook and cranny, barreling down roads and tracks where he had never so much as set foot before, but the entire time he could only think about how much of a waste of time this was. King Candy wasn't here, and they both knew it.

Every raceway was deserted. Turbo wouldn't have taken any notice of this, as he wasn't used to traversing through Sugar Rush after hours and had no idea what the normal activity level was, but the lack of racers holding noncompetitives seemed to worry Vanellope. "They're out here every day!" she fretted, glancing over her shoulder at him from the seat of her car. "Where did everybody go?"

He lifted his shoulders and then allowed them to drop, his gaze remaining fixated on the road. "Maybe they decided to call it a day early. Or maybe we were at the castle for longer than we thought."

"Right after King Crazy reappears? That seems kinda weird – hey, what's that over there?!"

She pulled off of the road abruptly, and Turbo swerved to stay behind her, soon feeling the wheels of his kart bump over patches of mint grass blades. Vanellope's destination was a small grove of weeping sugar trees, foliage whose long branches draped strands of candy necklaces, fruit-by-the-foot, and other elongated confections nearly down to the ground. As he hopped out of his car and approached, he could see a cluster of small figures hiding among the boughs, huddling together fearfully.

"Taffyta, is that you?!" exclaimed Vanellope.

A pink, mascara-streaked face parted the tree's flimsy curtain. "Vanellope!" gasped Taffyta. At the sound of the president's name, the other girls behind her squealed and squirmed out around the pink racer. Candlehead, Adorabeezle, Jubileena, Minty, and Snowanna all appeared to be equally terrified of...something.

"What's going on?" questioned Vanellope, helping Taffyta brush the powdered sugar from her dress and stockings. "Why are you all hiding like this?"

" _Everyone's_ hiding!" cried Taffyta. "We saw King Candy and he...he...he  _threatened_ us when he saw us staring!" At this point, she noticed the flabbergasted Turbo, and her teary smeary blue eyes narrowed.

Turbo held up his hands defensively. "Don't look at me. Do I look like King Candy to you?"

"It wasn't him, Taffyta. He's been with me ever since the end of the Random Roster Race," confirmed Vanellope, patting her strawberry friend's shoulder. "But we know who it  _actually_ was."

" _What_  it actually was," he corrected.

"Right. Which way did you see it go?"

Taffyta flapped her hands in front of her face, as if trying to shoo the makeup-blackened moisture away. "H-he was driving down the road from the castle before," she sniffled. "And from w-what I could tell after that, he stayed on the main road. But that's all I saw. Then we ran and hid here."

Turbo scrunched up his snub nose unhappily. "I'll bet that was when he was leaving after stealing your royal car, Vanny. And if he stayed on the main road, then he's heading for the exit, which doesn't help us."

"No it doesn't," she admitted. "We can always go up to the Rainbow Bridge to try and get a view of everything..."

The Rainbow Bridge. The exit of the game. How had he known that they were going to end up there sooner or later? He stiffened, but Vanellope seemed to take no notice as she continued to comfort Taffyta and the other girls. "Don't worry, everyone, you don't hafta be scared. President Vanellope von Schweetz is on the job! You know I'm always looking out for my subjects!" She bowed to them, then grinned and took Turbo by the arm. "And of course, Private Pajama Pants here will help too."

Private Pajama Pants was going to be a pretty freaking useless ally, seeing as how he had no combat skills whatsoever, couldn't leave the game, and oh yeah,  _had caused the entire problem in the first place_. But he kept silent as he and Vanellope returned to their cars and tore through the game at top speed, as if they could actually do something about the dire emergency threatening their home.

This time, they parked at the bottom and hiked up the sugar-crusted belt on foot, since there wasn't enough room at the apex of the bridge for both of their vehicles. The very top presented them with the same view of Sugar Rush's magnificent edible designs, but now the hills and valleys and racetracks were deserted, and the entire place carried an atmosphere of foreboding abandonment. King Candy's name bore a lot of weighty fear in this game, that much was for certain. Turbo wondered if the malware had stopped anywhere else on his way to or from the castle, delivering cool threats to the citizens in that lispy singsong voice of his, assuring everyone that he would be reappointed to power soon. And worst of all, between their past experiences and yesterday's disastrous Random Roster Race, they would all think that it was Turbo doing this, when he wasn't even physically connected to the rogue entity anymore.

"We're sunk," he groaned, sinking against the entrance to Game Central Station. As soon as he drew near, the barrier rippled to life across the opening, catching him like a blue electric safety net.

Vanellope began to work at her lower lip with her teeth. "Maybe I  _should_  go out there. I'm sure that I could do something – "

"Vanny, no," he pleaded. "Please don't. I… I can’t let him hurt you again." His pale fingers dug into his sleeves. "I can't lose you..."

She reached out and took his hand, and he immediately accepted it, his eyes falling shut bitterly. "I'm really sorry about this, 'Bo," she sighed. "If only we hadn’t ripped out your codes like we did, maybe you wouldn't have ended up glitchy..."

"Yeah, well, if I hadn't tried to kill you guys, you wouldn't have had to rip out my code."

"That wasn't  _all_  your fault. There was malware, and we just saw how evil that thing is..."

"Glitter-graphics, we can sit here playing the blame game all day, but it isn't going to get us anywhere." He released his hold on her and stared down at his shoes. "The point is, we're in trouble and we can't do anything about it...or rather, I can't do anything about it, because glitches can't leave their games."

"Glitches can't leave their games," she repeated solemnly, hanging her head as she turned back to the desolate view of Sugar Rush.

Turbo leaned against the barrier and repeated that rule in his head for a while.  _Glitches can't leave their games...glitches can't leave their games...glitches can't leave their games..._

_Glitches can't leave their games._

_Glitches can't leave THEIR games..._

His eyes snapped wide open.

Right then and there, he came to a decision. It might turn out to be one of his trademark bad, going-Turbo, chain-reaction-of-torment-and-misery decisions, but he would try it anyway. If it didn't work, it didn't work, and he had to do  _something_.

So he turned to the barrier, pressed both of his hands against the wavering surface, concentrated, and forced himself to glitch.

_Zzt_. A sensation resembling an uncomfortable static shock prickled against his palms, and he drew back automatically, before furrowing his brow with frustration. His hands went back up on the force field, and he tried again with much the same results.  _Zzzzt_.

Vanellope swung around to face him. "Pajama Boy, what're you doing?" she demanded. "You’re gonna hurt yourself!"

"Come on, come on, I can do this," he muttered under his breath. "All I have to do is not pull away, and..."  _Zzzzzt!_ He winced. "Augh! Just one more try..."

She tilted her head at him, as if afraid that the pressure of the situation had caused him something to come loose in his mind. "Uh, Turbo...?"

His muscles were straining as he pushed his palms against the force field, and he squeezed his eyes shut, this time forcing himself to unravel into pixels completely instead of simply fizzling. One, two, three, glitch –

_Zzzp!_

Turbo stumbled several steps forward as the solid surface beneath his hands suddenly vanished. Rigid with shock, he opened his eyes. Most of his arms were still entrapped within the game, and coming up against a hefty obstacle that he couldn't escape no matter how hard he pushed. But from the wrists down...

He wriggled his fingers, ensuring that yes, his hands were now on the other side of the barrier, and yes, he still had control over them. He twisted his wrists slowly, this way and that, ensuring that he didn't accidentally pull them back inside. At last, elation crept across his face shock like ivy gradually dominating a cracked stone wall, taking the form of an enormous yellow-toothed grin. "Turbo-Tastic!"

Vanellope was gaping. "But...I don't understand. Glitches can't leave their games!"

He turned to her, starting to laugh. "But this isn't  _my_  game!"

As he had suspected (or rather, hoped), he possessed at least a slight immunity to the Sugar Rush firewall. Like most games, the programming was designed to keep corrupted files from leaving and causing problems outside its area of influence, but despite the fact that he was connected to it, it recognized him as only an unknown foreign object. It would automatically try to prevent him from leaving when it identified the glitch in his code, but given enough of a jolt – such as the type generated from a few intentional glitches – it might bend for him.

Which meant that, theoretically, he now had the ability to leave the game if he was willing to endure a few electric shocks.

"Looks like my game-jumping days aren't over yet!" he declared.

The barrier made a sort of sucking sound when he wrenched his hands through again, but he hardly noticed, since he had already taken off running down the slope and towards his kart. Vanellope followed him effortlessly in a flurry of speed-glitches, whooping triumphantly. "All right! Let's do this thing!"

He had left his goggles atop the driver's seat, and now he snapped them over his face, feeling a surge of his old confidence for the first time in he-couldn't remember-how-long. He could do this, he  _knew_  he could. Once again, he felt like the greatest racer ever. He slammed his foot on the gas pedal, flooring it, his wheels screeching in surprise as he barreled up the Rainbow Bridge.

Vanellope's kart was practically bumper-to-bumper with his, and she beeped her horn in concern when she noticed that he wasn't easing off on his speed as he neared the top. "Pajama Boy, shouldn't you be taking this a little slower?!" she called.

"I never take it slow when I'm in a race!" he shouted back. And what a race this was: the winner would defeat King Candy and save the arcade, and the loser...well, he didn't even want to think about what would happen to the loser in this scenario. The force field was flickering visibly now as he drew closer, but he didn't allow himself to be deterred by the sight. He gripped the steering wheel and drew in a lungful of air.

_Just focus...and concentrate...and..._

GLITCH!

He ended up involuntarily squeezing his eyes shut, so it was the moment of sudden and fleeting agony that let him know when he reached the barrier. He cried out, his car momentarily faltering as the pain caused his resolve to weaken, swerving slightly as he zoomed forward. It felt as if he'd just been delivered a full-body electrocution! Then his eyes flew open and he was grappling with the wheel as he tried to regain control of the vehicle, all the while struggling to keep up with the twists and turns in the extension cord tunnel. His own exclamations of surprise and Vanellope's shrieks behind him bounced around in the darkened space.

Just when he was beginning to think that it would never end, warm light slammed in front of his face like a wall, and he found his kart bouncing through the Sugar Rush train depot. With a last startled yelp, he stomped on the brake pedal, skidding sideways until he eventually came to a halt right in the middle of Game Central Station.

Turbo sat there for a moment, dazed and blinking behind his goggles, little tremors and glitches breaking out all along his body. Then, as he gradually came to grips with his new location, he leapt out of his seat and pumped a fist into the air. "I did it!" he cheered, relieved laughter breaking through his words. " _I did it!_ I can't believe that actually worked! Turbo-Tasti – "

He cut himself off when he realized that the entire population of Game Central Station – including more characters than he had ever seen before in his life, some of them complex creatures, some of them unrecognizable caricatures, and some of them so close to looking like entirely realistic humans that only their bizarre costumes or wishfully optimistic body proportions gave them away – was staring at him. He didn't recognize any of the eyes landing on him, but considering that he was infamous here, bursting into the Station at top speed in a go-kart with a huge red T on it and then proceeding to shout "Turbo-Tastic" was probably not leaving any questions as to his identity.

He dropped back into his seat, glitching.

Vanellope, who had braked not too far away from him, tossed a snort in his direction. "Nice going, Pajama Boy. Turbo-Tastic indeed."

"Maybe not so much." He dragged a hand across his chalk-white cheek, then clasped the gearshift again. "Anyway, come on, we have some malware to find."

She nodded, immediately ignoring the stunned looks of the bystanders. "Where do we start looking?"

From the other side of the Station, a muffled crash was audible, and the portal to one of the games immediately began to flash red and wail out a siren tone. Characters milling about and minding their own business began to cry out as they fell aside like dominoes, and through it all, a revving engine sound rumbled closer and closer. Turbo strained his neck, but between the distance, his lack of height, and the crowd surrounding him, he couldn't quite see what was going on. "Um, let's check there first."

He edged into reverse cautiously and then pulled forward, and if his infamy had no other advantages, at least it caused the people gawking at him to part immediately when he was trying to get through. Still, he couldn't go fast, and he had to be extremely cautious. This was the populated hub between games in its busiest hours of the day, containing a few more obstacles than the average racetrack, and accidentally running into a hapless bystander wasn't going to do his reputation any favors. Vanellope inched along at his side, seemingly adhering to the same driving principles as he was; he doubted that she'd ever driven in the middle of Game Central Station before. The place had hardly changed at all, he reflected wistfully, except for the number of characters and the fact that he didn't recognize the titles of any of the games scrolling by...

Then something collided with the side of his car, and safety was promptly flung to the four winds. He turned to see what had hit him and screamed.

Should he really have been so shocked to find King Candy's face snarling back at him? The false monarch had plowed his white chocolate kart into Turbo's slightly less regal vehicle, and Turbo yanked his steering wheel back and forth as he tried to regain some semblance of control. "You again?!" growled the king. "For someone who can't do a thing, you just don't know when to quit, hoo-hoo!" The laugh seemed strained and almost demented, and it was accompanied by him ramming into the side of Turbo's car anew, causing the lightweight vehicle to creak and shift dangerously to its two right side wheels. Oh no...

"Cut that out, you freak!" protested Turbo, recoiling in his seat since it was now impossible for him to drive away. His yellow eyes were so wide that they could have been miniature suns as he frantically searched for Vanellope, but now she was nowhere to be seen.

King Candy merely smirked and tapped the side of his opponent's kart one more time, this time lightly, but it was enough to cause the car to lose its balance and tilt completely sideways as its left wheels came off of the floor. Turbo shrieked and skidded into a group of stunned onlookers, cursing the fact that video game developers seemed to hold some sort of grudge against seatbelts, and ended up smashing against the wall while King Candy sped off to another outlet, chuckling all the way.

Turbo pushed himself up with a groan, shaking his head to clear it. He was surrounded by characters of all kinds, but not one of them made any motion to help him, even though they'd all just seen  _him_  get attacked. Granted, he wasn't seriously hurt, mostly due to his trusty helmet, but still.

Finally, a familiar voice called, "Are you okay, kid?!"

A giant hand descended towards him, and Turbo latched onto it gratefully, dragging himself to his feet and doing his best to steady his trembling legs. Falling out of the car had shaken him up more than he'd realized. "Thanks, Ralph."

"No problem." Ralph raised one bushy eyebrow. "Now explain to me,  _how exactly did you get out of Sugar Rush?!_ "

"I..." Turbo's heartbeat quickened, and he glanced around Game Central Station as he suddenly realized where Vanellope might have gotten herself off to. Sure enough, she was standing on top of her just a few feet away, pouting as Felix lectured her about the importance of obeying one's elders. Calhoun floated behind them on her cruiser, gritting her teeth and clearly eager to get a move on. Caught by the grown-ups...of course.

“I glitched my way out!” he finally blurted.

Ralph shook his head slowly. "You know what, that’s exactly what Vanellope said. She insisted that you had come with her when Felix spotted her, but I didn’t really believe her."

"It’s true!" Turbo shuffled his feet anxiously. "Look, I can explain the whole thing later, but right now we have a bigger problem! Or did you not see the thing where King Candy just flipped my car over?!"

"We all saw that," grunted Calhoun, pushing her cruiser over to them like a surfer propelling their board across the water. "He was trying to create a distraction so we wouldn’t see where he was headed. And it worked, because all of a sudden we had to worry about keeping an eye on you two!"

He flinched slightly, but… “I think I know where he is,” he realized aloud.

“Nice try, champ, but there’s no way you could have seen that,” she responded sharply.

“I didn’t _see_ it, but I know anyway!” Turbo scampered a few steps past her, jabbing his finger at one of the outlets. “I think he’s in there!”

Everyone’s eyes flicked upwards, reading the title scrolling past. Just two words, which didn’t mean anything to Turbo, but –

"Hero's Duty?!" exclaimed Felix incredulously, his gloved hand clamped around Vanellope's. "Oh my land! You don't think he's trying to – "

"Would you really put it past him?!" Calhoun glared down at Vanellope and Turbo with a huff, and from Turbo's viewpoint, she was as towering as a giantess as she scowled disapprovingly at the two young racers. "You kids really should have stayed at home! Don't you realize how dangerous things are about to get around here?!"

Vanellope crossed her arms into a tight pretzel knot over her chest. "Yes, we do, but we're not leaving!"

Turbo bobbed his head in firm agreement. "Just like I said before, this is still my problem to solve! I'm going to fix this, no matter how dangerous it is, and I'm not gonna leave no matter what you say!"

Calhoun facepalmed. "All right, Turbo, congratulations, you're officially a member of the family. You're a pig-headed stubborn moron with an unusually low sense of self-preservation, just like the rest of us. But let me make one thing perfectly clear, and this goes for both of you: Hero's Duty is my game. And as long as you're in my game, you play by my rules. Are we clear?"

"Clear," confirmed Turbo and Vanellope in soft, resigned unison.

"Wreck-It, stay with the kids. Keep them as far away from the action as possible," ordered Calhoun, and Ralph obediently stepped in front of Turbo and Vanellope like a sentient wall. "Fix-It, you're with me. We're going to get in there, find the little rat, and drive him out before he can cause any trouble. And if you see any Cy-bugs, leave 'em to me, got it?"

All four of them nodded vigorously. Meanwhile, none of the civilians in Game Central Station seemed to have any idea of how to react.

Calhoun hoisted her rifle over her shoulder, hitting some control that caused it to make a whining power-up noise, and gestured broadly towards the Hero's Duty outlet. "Let's move out, troops!"

* * *

 

It took Turbo approximately twelve seconds to decide that he did not like Hero's Duty one bit.

It figured that the first new game he'd travelled to since becoming a glitch, which also happened to be one of the current flagship titles in Litwak's Arcade, had to be a total and complete creep fest. On some level, he supposed that he'd always suspected that gamers had a high tolerance level for unsettling material, or else a ghost boy like him never would have ended up as being the most popular game in the arcade for as long as he had. But he'd figured that advances in graphics and technology would result in  _less_  horrific worlds like Sugar Rush, not the craggy landscape of Calhoun's home turf, which was barren and tinted in sickly green and punctuated by a huge jagged tower rising up towards the dim sky. The fact that Calhoun's first move of action at the train station had been to swap her rifle for a new, almost comically huge gun was also not very reassuring.

"This place is kinda scary," he muttered, his pupils flitting back and forth nervously. He was waiting near the field-of-play entrance with Ralph and Vanellope while Felix and Calhoun talked to an armored soldier several yards away, and just the thought that King Candy could be waiting to jump out from behind a rock or plotting an ambush in the skyscraper was keeping Turbo high-strung and anxious. The lighting was so poor here, as if it had been optimized for underhanded sneak attacks...

"You should try seeing it while it's active," responded Ralph. "When all those Cy-bugs are out and flying around everywhere...man, I'm getting the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it." He shook his head. "That’s why we never hang out here.”

“I come here for shooting lessons with Sarge sometimes,” commented Vanellope.

A thought occurred to Turbo. "Calhoun can regenerate here, can’t she?”

"Yeah. She’s about as safe as she can get here, ironically enough. The rest of us aren't so lucky."

Turbo squinted at the ground thoughtfully. "I don't get it. I'm sure that King Candy wants to kill all five of us, so why did he pick a game where only four of us could end up gone for good? Literally any other game besides Sugar Rush could have offed us all, so why this place...?"

Vanellope reached out and touched Turbo’s arm. "Don’t you remember the story last night? About how Ralph accidentally brought a Cy-Bug into Sugar Rush and it had a lot of babies and almost ate everything?"

Ralph snorted. "That’s one way of putting it.”

"Well," she continued, biting her lip, "the malware has Turbo's memories of that stuff happening, right? So if he knows how destructive Cy-Bugs can be and how good they are at taking over other games, he might be trying to make, like, his own army of them. I bet that Sarge thinks that he's doing that, too, and that's why she's trying to figure out from her soldiers where he went."

"An army of Cy-Bugs…?!” Ralph's jaw dropped. "But those things won't listen to anybody! Is he completely insane?!"

She aimed a deadpan look at him. "...um, yes, Stinkbrain, he is. We've already established that."

"...right. Gotcha." He cleared his throat. "I really hope you’re wrong. What do you think, Turbo?"

Turbo was silent.

"Um, kid...?"

"He's coming..." Turbo hardly recognized the breathy words, which escaped his mouth in a gasping whisper. He had become so completely frozen and rigid that when a terrified glitch rolled through him, his entire body rippled around the edges, as if he’d become a liquid mirror image of himself. That code malfunction seemed to break whatever spell of terror he was under, and a panicked spasm immediately bucked his chest. "He's  _coming_!" he shouted, head snapping around wildly, trying to figure out if they had enough time to break for the exit.

"Woah, kid, calm down!" Ralph couldn’t help looking around too, infected by Turbo’s panic. "Who's coming? King Candy?! How do you know?!"

"I can feel it!" Now Turbo was struggling not to hyperventilate. It was impossible for him to calm down when every survival instinct woven into his code was screaming at him to run, to run  _now_ because something big and horrible and dangerous and scary was after him. This time, it wouldn’t be just a little old man with an abnormal amount of strength – this time, they were going to see the malware’s true power. And he didn't even understand why he was feeling this way until the reason for his terror finally descended to the ground behind him.

At first he heard the buzzing, such an even, mechanical drone that he was certain it must have been emanating from a set of spinning helicopter blades. The sounds of metal pincers clicking and heavy, mechanical mass dropping to the ground behind the trio disproved this idea somewhat, but until he haltingly forced his feet to turn him around, he still suspected the unknown object of being a machine. It didn’t sound even a little bit alive. And after he saw it, he wondered if it could really be counted as living at all, or if the hatred and malware had sucked the last glimmer of life out of it long ago, leaving nothing but a flat, dead expression behind its pupils.

The creature was huge – enormous – gargantuan – he didn't have an adjective that would accurately describe its sheer size. If it had wanted to, it could have plucked up Ralph and held him in one deformed, clawlike hand like a hackey sack, and Vanellope and Turbo would have had no more success going up against it than a couple of tiny bugs. The bitterly ironic thing was that  _this_  creature was the bug, a giant metal bug, with striped legs ending in points sharp enough for skewering victims, garish coloring that glinted teasingly from its armor-plated body, and a licorice-like whip tail snaking out behind it.

And worst of all, at the end of its long, segmented neck, nested in a cone of frills, was...

"Welcome back to the boss level!" The lips on the King Candy head formed the words, which boomed out between purple striped markings and newly sharpened teeth. It was the same voice, all right, although if Turbo had been thinking rationally instead of reeling with terror, he might have expected something a bit more inhuman. The King Candy Cy-bug licked its lips as it gazed down at the helpless trio, and it leaned down to deliver its next declaration in a mockingly gleeful tone:

"I did say that I had access to ALL of my add-ons, didn't I!"


	17. Scared

The appearance of the King Candy Cy-Bug seemed to have brought Turbo's code to a stuttering halt, like a sprite frozen and flickering on a console screen and unable to react to the player's demands for movement. Aside from his nervous glitching, his muscles had locked up completely. When a thought beyond formless terror finally appeared in his mind, it was possibly the stupidest thing that he could have reacted with given the situation:

_I'm scared._

Of course he was scared; anyone coming face-to-face with this literal deformed monster would be scared. But there was more to those words than even he fully understood. The horror that had engulfed him was raw and childlike, the paralyzing fear of the creatures under the bed or the things that lurked in nightmares, the crippling need to cling to someone for comfort and find shelter from the entities in the night who were ceaselessly hunting him. This was what he had felt during those not-so-rare instances in Turbo Time when he'd woken up screaming, plagued by terrifying dreams, and his bravado had melted away and he was left with the full reality of his age.

_I’m just a kid and I’m scared…!_

Past and present, dreams and reality...his mind was blurring under pressure, while his eyes remained fixed on the King Candy bug, so wide that they could have been glowing yellow headlights in the dim landscape.  _Just give up,_ his fear seemed to whisper to him darkly.  _You can't beat this thing, and you're not worth it, anyway_.

"KID, WATCH OUT!"

King Candybug lunged, Ralph grabbed Turbo by his collar, and the spell was abruptly shattered. Turbo's fear clamped around his chest like an enormous icy fist, and he gasped, quickly discovering that it was a trial to prevent himself from hyperventilating. He was trembling so violently that he almost tripped and fell on his face when Ralph dropped him back to the ground, and then all three of them were running, heading for a cluster of rocks where they might be able to take cover. Their hiding place would last them a few minutes, if they were lucky, but hopefully in that time Sergeant Calhoun would notice the giant multicolored Cy-Bug and decide to put her giant gun to use.

Ralph was shielding both of his young companions as best he could, not that it would actually mean much if King Candybug launched an abrupt attack. Even the gigantic wrecker was dwarfed in comparison to the thing chasing them, and when Turbo happened to glance upwards, he saw that Ralph was scared, too. Of course, Ralph had gone up against this bone-chilling hybrid once before, and almost hadn't lived to tell about it. This was probably his own personal nightmare.

Then King Candybug flicked out his – its? – dual whip-like tails, and with a single blow, all three smaller sprites went sprawling to the ground. Turbo smacked against the stony, uneven surface with enough force to knock the wind out of him, and he cringed, so weak with terror and exhaustion that for a moment he wondered if he should bother getting up again. But those hopeless thoughts were quenched when he heard Vanellope cry out, and the second he realized that the monster must have turned its attention on her, he shoved himself upwards, eyes blazing as a protective fire that he had never fully experienced before ignited across his entire body.

The malware was not going to hurt Vanellope. She was his best friend, practically his little sister, and  _he would not let it hurt her_!

"Vanny!" he cried, running for her, unsteady on his feet. She had landed some distance away from the still-recovering Ralph, King Candybug leering over her, and she called out for Turbo in the same way that she might call upon a big brother to protect her from a group of playground bullies. But something a little more dangerous was after them now, and just as he was within his reach, a set of razor-sharp neon claws closed around him and yanked him back.

" _Turbo!"_ she screeched, leaping to her feet as he was unceremoniously hoisted into the air.

"NO!" Turbo cried, unable to free his arms to reach for her. The claws clamped ever-tighter around him and twisted him sharply, forcing him to confront the grinning face of King Candybug. He shuddered and glitched, assaulted with a sudden mental image of those fangs sinking into his pale flesh.

"Aww, look at you," crooned King Candybug mockingly, tipping up Turbo's chin with a fingertip that would have been better suited to skewering the young racer. "For a second, you actually thought that you could play the _hero_ , and now you’re shaking with fear!” He cackled. "You’re my first priority right now, anyway. Hold on tight, we're going for a ride!" With that, he unfolded his wings and launched himself into a near-vertical ascent.

Turbo squirmed and struggled in the malware's grasp, fully aware that his attempts would get him nowhere fast, but too panicked to do anything besides react automatically. "Please..." he gasped, his windpipe tight from fear. "Please, let me go!"

"It's too late for just asking nicely, little one!" King Candybug sang out. "I offered you the chance to join me, didn't I?! But you refused. Well, now you get to see what happens when you defy your _king_!"

Turbo realized that he was wheezing. They were perilously high now, caught in a flurry of ashy black particles, and his captor now perched nonchalantly on top of the ninety-nine story building. He ceased his attempts to escape, suddenly realizing that if he wanted to stay alive, he was better off in the hands of someone who could fly...even if that someone was a deranged malware-ridden maniac who wanted to murder him. Hero's Duty, unlike Sugar Rush, had fall damage. Major fall damage.

"Oh, are you going to make it _easy_ on me now? Maybe you’ve realized how ungrateful you are," King Candybug continued in an insectile hiss. "When I found you, you were just a guilt-ridden little grub hiding out in Game Central Station, because the everyone who used to tease you wanted to tear you _limb from limb_ after you dared to take a stand against them! Then _I_ came along, and I needed a host, and you needed a backbone – and we were perfect partners! You were still so _angry_ at everyone, so _desperate_ for attention, and that was exactly what I needed! But after all my hard work, _this_ is how you repay me?! Well, no matter. Now I’ve got you, and it won't take much to erase a  _ghost boy_ like you. They forgot you once, and they'll do it again. Remember RoadBlasters?! Remember how happy everyone was to replace you?!"

Turbo set his teeth. "I'm n-n-not listening t-to you!" RoadBlasters was years in the past, too far gone to be of any consequence anymore. Sure, the gamers had long forgotten him by now, and even the rest of the arcade no longer remembered that before Turbo had ever become an evil dictator, he'd been nothing but a misguided teen who made one very bad choice that set off a deadly chain reaction. But now there were people who cared about him, who would miss him if he was gone, who would see him for who he was no matter what.

He had a family now, and he was going to get back to them.

And then he started glitching.

His eyes widened, and he sucked in a deep breath, willing the disruptions to settle. But there was no way that he could calm down when he was suspended near the edges of an FPS game's atmosphere, entrapped within the claws of a Cy-bug hybrid who was ready to kill him, and a more violent spasm of red binary wracked his body.

"No," he whispered. “Not _now_ …!”

King Candybug's eyebrows crinkled, but before he could decide how to deal with this development, Turbo glitched again – and this time it was severe enough that he slipped out of his captor's grasp and dropped, screaming, towards the ground at full speed.

He was lucky that King Candybug had decided to rest on the tower. The building was jagged with ledges and outcroppings and other convenient handholds, and somehow his flailing hands managed to grab hold of one, tearing the skin off his palms but at least saving him from a splattery death. Shaking and glitching and trying to suppress the screams being channeled to his throat by adrenaline, he managed to haul himself upwards, onto what turned out to be a sort of shelf jutting out from about halfway up the tower. As he tremblingly dragged his body as far from the edge as possible, he happened to catch a glimpse of the dizzying drop waiting with open arms below him, and he cringed and recoiled into the side of the metal structure. If he hadn't been quite afraid of heights before, then he certainly would be from now on.

_I'm scared!_

Why wasn't King Candybug coming after him yet? Hesitantly, he lifted his eyes ( _easier to look up than down, anyway_ ) and noticed a swift black shape darting around the monster on what was undoubtedly a cruiser, diverting it with sharp plasma blasts that created miniature fireworks against its armored exterior. Sergeant Calhoun had finally stepped in. Of course, she might not have wanted to intervene while Turbo was being quite literally held captive, but now that he was temporarily out of the direct line of fire, she had her chance to shine.

He watched her for several minutes, mesmerized. The King Candybug was several dozen times larger than her, and his speed was nothing to scoff at either, but Calhoun continued her offensive like a woman possessed. Every shot she fired was another chance at protecting her game, her husband, and her family. That thought caused Turbo to frown and peek over the ledge as far as he dared, trying to spot Ralph and Vanellope, but the only motion visible on the ground were the dark specks of Hero's Duty soldiers rushing out in formation. Glowing green blotches indicated that there were more Cy-Bugs than just King Candy running loose right now. This was quickly becoming a full-out battle.

Then the tower vibrated beneath Turbo, and he flinched and glitched simultaneously, immediately anticipating the worst. His first thought was that the normal Cy-bugs were coming after him now. That was his second thought, too, but when he gathered up enough courage to peer over the edge of his perch, the sight awaiting him took him very much by surprise.

"Ralph!" he exclaimed, his voice little more than a tremulous squeak.

"Stay right where you are, kid!" grunted Ralph, panting out the words between short breaths of exertion. He was scaling the building, powerful fist lifting over powerful fist, using his bare feet like those of a monkey to elevate him to different handholds. His forehead was crinkled with the effort of his climb, and of course if he slipped and fell, then he was a goner; but he didn't seem to be spending much time contemplating that particular course of action. Then again, he had done this before. The first time it had been to obtain a medal, and now it was to retrieve someone who Ralph probably thought never thought he’d be trying to save.

Turbo scooted back from the edge, blood red pixels crackling around his eyes. "Where else do you think I'm gonna go?" he muttered.

It took Ralph a mere few minutes to reach Turbo’s floor, and that was counting the fact that Cy-Bugs were beginning to swarm up the tower; fortunately, Calhoun's men seemed to be doing a fair job of keeping the smaller enemies at bay. Calhoun herself was still locked in battle with the King Candbybug. Ralph punched a large hole into a nearby window, plucked up Turbo by the back of his collar, and dropped the young racer inside the building before clambering in himself.

As soon as Turbo's feet had planted down on a solid surface and his lack of an outside view had rendered his vertigo obsolete, the adrenaline rush that had allowed him to survive drained away. He went weak all over and crumpled to his knees, glitching and hyperventilating, one hand clamped over his chest as if to restrain his wildly thudding heart.

"Okay, kid, take it easy," Ralph panted quietly, still winded from his ascent. His gaze briefly darted towards the hole in the window. "You're okay now."

Turbo sucked in a shuddering breath and staggered to his feet. His body was sore, his palms were bleeding, he was cold and tired and glitchy and  _scared_ and he wanted to go home. But before he could voice any of these complaints, a horrible thought occurred to him, and his eyes snapped wide open. "Vanellope – where's Vanellope?!"

"She's fine, too," Ralph assured him. "She's with Felix." Noticing Turbo's lack of an expression change after this statement, the wrecker added, "I’m not gonna say don’t worry about them, but neither of them is exactly helpless, either. They know what they’re doing.”

Turbo exhaled slowly. "O... Okay." He dipped his head in a shivery nod. He knew just how much Vanellope meant to Ralph, and Ralph wouldn't have left her anywhere unless he was truly certain that she would be safe. Everything was under control...for now. "You...you just...you climbed up the..."

"Don't mention it." Ralph shrugged, as if climbing up a few dozen stories was simply an everyday occurrence for him. "You didn't look like you could get yourself out of that one, and besides, Vanellope was yelling at me to do something. You know, she really cares about you a lot, kid."

Turbo nodded again, somberly, before a quivering smile inched its way across his mouth. "...a-and you don't?"

Ralph scowled and turned his face away quickly, but not before his slightly widened eyes and telltale blush were visible. "Keep your voice down, okay?" he muttered gruffly. "You might wake up the bugs, and then we'll all be in trouble."

"Bugs...?" Turbo glanced over his shoulder, and for the first time, he noticed that most of the room's floor was layered with dozens upon dozens of gently pulsing green spheres. At the moment, they were all laying still and inactive, but given what game they were in, it didn't take a rocket scientist to determine what they must be. Cy-Bug eggs. Just this area alone would be more than enough to give King Candy the fodder he needed for his army...

A familiar prickling shiver zipped down his spine, and he gasped, his eyes slamming shut once more. "Oh no!"

Ralph looked startled. "Kid, what's – "

"Ralph, look out!" shouted Turbo, a split second too late. The entirety of the window behind Ralph exploded into a blizzard of glass shards as the King Candybug lunged through it, one claw extended to eliminate anything or anyone who might be blocking his path. Ralph was swatted against the wall before he had any time to react, and he slumped to the floor, temporarily down for the count. With him out of the way, King Candybug, who could barely cram his entire body into the room, turned his attention to Turbo.

Turbo tried to stand, but it was no use; he was just so dizzy and weak and shaky...the best he could do was scrabbling backwards on hands and knees, and even then, it only took King Candybug a mere few effortless steps to back his prey into a corner. All around them, the emerald glow within the Cy-Bug eggs intensified, sweeping over the clusters of spheres in bright ribbons. "Now," he hissed, lurching back and forth on his striped legs with the anticipation of the upcoming kill, "let's finish this! _Finally_ , I’ll be able to reclaim my rightful place, and meanwhile you – " He blinked, head descending slightly as he got a good look at the cowering racer. "You...you're crying."

He seemed unsure whether to be stunned or delighted by this revelation, so he settled with simply repeating the words as tears streamed freely down Turbo’s cheeks. "You're crying. You're crying! Are you really that weak, little one?! Have I scared you that much?!"

"O-of course I’m scared!” gasped Turbo, dragging one dirty sleeve across his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I be?! I’m scared because every time I look at you, I’m seeing _me_! I – I _chose_ to turn into you! Every single stupid choice I ever made, every second I spent wanting people to pay more attention to me, turned me into _this_! Now you’re always going to be a part of me, no matter what I do, and I’m scared because now I’ll never stop wondering if I’m going to end up becoming _you_ again!”

King Candybug paused for a moment longer...then his fangs drew up into a sneer. "Don’t worry. You won’t have to keep wondering for long, ahoohoohoo!” He poised one garishly-colored claw high in the air, preparing to strike at Turbo's throat...

There was a bang, a muzzle flash, and the insectile hybrid's head snapped forward as a projectile struck him in the segmented neck.

"Youch!" he exclaimed, sounding more like he was voicing a complaint than actually in any pain. "What the gumdrops was that?!"

"That was _me_ , warning you to knock it off and get away from my friend!" retorted a familiar voice, and Turbo craned his head around King Candybug’s leg to see Vanellope, scowling and aiming a blaster that was almost as big as she was. Right behind her was Felix, holding a slightly smaller gun, and half a second later, Calhoun swooped through the busted window on her cruiser.

“What happened to Wreck-It?!” she demanded, noticing the unconscious Bad Guy on the floor.

"Oh my land!" cried Felix. "Don't worry, brother, I can fix it!" With that, he used a platformer's leap to bound forward, where he promptly swung his golden hammer down towards Ralph's head. Turbo didn't see anything that happened afterwards, though, because suddenly Calhoun was shoving behind a nearby console, along with Vanellope.

“ _Stay right there!”_ she bellowed, before swooping in to focus on King Candybug again.

After a few well-placed shots from Calhoun, King Candybug emitted a buzzing growl and turned his divided attention to her, most likely hoping to get rid of the nuisance quickly and then return to kill Turbo. But she was too agile and speedy to be brushed aside, and the battle raged on, Turbo gaping from his hiding spot.

"What do we do?" whispered Vanellope, her eyes brimming in terror as she watched her family –  _their_ family – desperately trying to fend off the danger. She still had her blaster, but if she tried to fire it again, she ran the risk of hitting Calhoun – who’d regenerate, of course, but in the few seconds that it would take to respawn, King Candybug could have slaughtered them all.

"I don't know." Turbo kneaded his forehead with his white knuckles. "I have no idea!"

"But the malware is attached to you!" she urged. "It used to have control of you, so you should know it better than anyone! You can even tell when it comes close! So think, Turbo...is there anything that we can do to stop it?! Think!"

He clutched his head in his hands, doing his best to obey her instructions, to fight past the fear clouding his mind. Now was not the time to be scared; now was the time for bravery. But what could a kid like him do to fight a ruthless, evil conglomeration of malware that had taken on a giant monstrous body?!

Meanwhile, King Candybug had dealt a nasty blow to Calhoun's stomach with his whiplike tails, flinging her several feet away and causing her to crash into a patch of Cy-Bug eggs. But now Ralph had been revived, and he quickly diverted the virus's attention towards him while Felix bolted over to his beloved wife, hammer at the ready.

Turbo gritted his teeth in frustration at the sight. "I don't know! I don't know what to do, Vanellope. I can't remember. All I know is that this thing is running off of my memories, and it has a bajillion different add-ons, and..."

He trailed off, recalling the declaration that the malware had made when it had first arrived in its King Candybug body. " _I did say that I had access to ALL of my add-ons, didn't I!"_ it had cackled, the implication being that its enormous Cy-Bug form was a character model that it could switch into at will. Which meant that it also had the ability to transform back into King Candy. And somehow, a little old man, even one with other powers, seemed highly preferable to King Candybug at the moment...

"Add-ons, that's it!" Turbo's head snapped towards Vanellope. "He was able to turn into a Cy-Bug because that body was in his code. He didn't have to get eaten again or anything. So maybe we can make him turn back into normal King Candy and have a better chance at beating him!"

She frowned. "But...why would he change back now when he's kicking all of our butts?!"

"Maybe he would if it was a matter of life and death for him." He allowed his eyes to fall shut, remembering one of his nightmares…his flashbacks at Diet Cola Mountain…the way that Ralph had recounted King Candy’s end. "After all, Cy-Bugs aren't indestructible, are they?"

Vanellope's breath hitched in understanding. "The beacon!"

Turbo started towards Calhoun, but Vanellope snagged his jumpsuit, hissing, “No, we can’t distract them! The beacon’s on the top floor. We can get up there ourselves!”

“But Sarge said to stay here!”

“What’s worse, listening to her and getting killed, or _not_ listening and actually surviving?!”

As if to confirm her words, King Candybug dodged Ralph's onslaught of punches and roared, lunging forward as best he could in the enclosed space. "I'm coming for you, you little glitches!"

"Let’s go!” said Turbo hurriedly.

As Vanellope dropped her blaster, grabbed his hand, and did her best to glitch them both through the chaos, he suddenly remembered what Felix had told him in the code vault: _"We don't know how much of you the malware has access to, and if we tried to destroy it, we might end up seriously hurting or even_ _killing_ _you!"_ Whether King Candybug got fried in the beacon or they simply managed to defeat him once he returned to his normal form, Turbo might not actually be around to celebrate the victory. The thought almost made him want to stop, run away, and save himself – but he nipped those thoughts in the bud.

Of course he didn't want to die; very few people did, whether they were adults, children, or somewhere in between. But if he did nothing, he’d be inviting King Candybug to murder his entire family, before moving on to the rest of the arcade. Wasn't it the right thing to do, to give himself up for the sake of every character who had made their home here? Wasn't he making the correct decision for once in his life?

So he kept silent as they bounded up flight after flight of stairs, too electrified by fear to feel any exertion. They arrived at the top floor both much too quickly and not nearly fast enough, and Vanellope led him on a skirting path around the Cy-Bug eggs, towards a huge switch set into the rear wall. Above it in faintly pulsing orange letters were the words EMERGENCY BEACON ACTIVATION.

No time for last words or even for a second of doubt. Turbo and Vanellope stretched up on their tiptoes, seized the handle, and yanked downwards with all the strength they had left. For several horrible moments, it seemed like the switch wouldn’t yield to a couple of tiny glitch kids, no matter how much they grunted and strained; then it snapped smoothly into the down position, and the world was flooded with a blue-white glare.

"Beacon up," muttered Vanellope, before yanking Turbo back towards the stairs in a crackle of cerulean pixels.

They returned to the sight of the grown-ups backing off as far as they could, while King Candybug howled inhumanly and clamped his claws over his head, trying to prevent himself from entering a beacon-induced trance. "Argh! No, no, it can't end like this!" he roared. "Not again!" But his eyes were flickering nonetheless, becoming blue and bug-like, sparkling in his surroundings' dangerous glow. In desperation, he tucked his head and legs into his body and collapsed himself into a tight ball, and dark static began to creep across the surface of his body. He kept on shrinking, until now he was no longer brushing the ceiling...now he was almost at a manageable size...and now he was nothing but a small round heap coiled up on the ground.

"Now we've got you!" declared Ralph, rushing out from his hiding place as if he thought that he could immediately eliminate the false king.

"Wreck-It, _DON'T_!" hollered Calhoun, but her warning came too late. With a snarl, King Candy uncurled and sprang into a battle stance, revealing that he hadn’t exactly become a little old man again. There were still purple markings zig-zagging around the edges of his mouth, his teeth were still numerous and much too sharp, and his hands were still candy-coated, razor-sharp claws. He intercepted Ralph with horribly jerky, inhuman movements, clawing the wrecker across the chest and leaving him to stumble aside painfully.

"Ralph!" squeaked Vanellope, horrified.

Turbo's eyes narrowed. If ever a chance for him to repay his debt had presented himself, then this was it. He broke away from Vanellope, only to hear her cry, “Turbo?! Where do you think you’re going?!”

“I’m finishing this,” he answered through clenched teeth.

“Then I’m going with you!”

“No, Vanny, you can’t.” He whirled around on his heels to face her for what might be the last time. “And I don’t mean that you’re not strong enough to help, but I have a plan, and it’ll only work if I do it alone. So…I’m finishing this.” And then, in a slightly softer voice, realizing that it might be the last thing he ever said to her: “I’m sorry.”

And he ran out into the center of the battlefield, shouting, “HEY!”

King Candy instantly turned towards him.

"I thought I was your top priority!” he continued, surprising himself with how confident he sounded. “So why don’t you just come and get me?! I’m right here!”

The bug-malware-man said nothing; maybe it wasn’t able to speak anymore. But it instantly lunged after Turbo, propelling itself forward with its disproportionately large claws, and Turbo bolted. But this time he wasn’t running away – he was running towards.

And he only had to run this one last time, he reminded himself. It would all be over soon. Forcing himself not to focus on what was about to happen, he made his way towards the shattered window. When King Candy pounced at him, causing them both to skid along the ground as he pinned the young racer with surprising strength, Turbo took some comfort in the fact that one way or another, everything was going to according to plan. Maybe he’d get his throat torn out, maybe not, but he’d succeed no matter what.

"That’s enough out of you, _GLITCH_!” growled King Candy. They were no longer inside the tower, but crouched precariously on the ledge just outside of the broken window, and Turbo was sprawled on his back while the malware's hands clamped ever-tighter around his throat. "Well, no more! All I have to do is give you a little push, and you'll become a real ghost boy, hoohoohoohoo! Finally, I’ll be able to take my place as the _TRUE_ Turbo! What do you say to that?!”

"You’re not Turbo,” wheezed Turbo, his choked-off words betraying how difficult it had become for him to breathe. Between the perilous drop present just a few inches behind him and the fingers clawing at his neck, he was scared out of his wits, but he would never show that to the king. “You’re not even a real character! _I_ am!”

“CAN’T YOU SEE, YOU _ARE_ ME!” roared King Candy, teeth flashing in Turbo’s face.

“No, I’m not,” huffed Turbo, hands curling into fists.

“Ahoo, _yes,_ you _ARE_!”

“No – ” He sucked in the deepest breath he could get through his windpipe, squeezed his eyes shut, and glitched. “ _I’m NOT!_ ”

King Candy yelped as the only thing between him and the long fall suddenly disintegrated, but Turbo didn't see him go over the edge, and he was quietly grateful for that. As he rematerialized behind the spot where the king had been, he felt several sets of hands pulling him to safety, but his vision was blurred and blotted and overwhelmed by dizzy spots. Glitching in his drained state had been difficult, to say the least, and it was having uncomfortable consequences for him, but the side effects were nothing compared to what would happen when the malware made contact with the ground.

He didn't hear the scream, not really, and fortunately he was much too far away to hear the sickening splat of inevitable impact, but that didn't prevent him from picturing the scene in his mind. He couldn't help but wonder if King Candy had tried to use his various add-ons to save himself, perhaps making a last, frantic attempt to transform back into a Cy-Bug and fly away to safety, only to run out of time when the craggy surface of the world came rushing towards him at a million miles an hour...and Turbo could also envision what happened afterwards, what happened when the virus was really and truly dead and its code began to dwindle away into nothing. The malware was outside of the game where its coding was located, and so it wouldn't regenerate. It would be gone for good. It would never hurt anyone again.

But it would also take Turbo down with it.

He’d thought that the end would be painful, like the agony of being trapped in RoadBlasters added to what he had felt when King Candy had split apart from him and multiplied by a hundredfold, but it wasn’t. In fact, he barely felt it happen. There was a moment of vertigo, a distant voice asking him if he was okay…and then a violent glitch tore through him and he crumpled to the floor.

It was over.

Turbo had come to a rest laying on his back, facing upwards. His eyes were closed, and try as he might, he had lost his ability to open them. His limp body refused to comply with his demands for movement. He had the feeling that it was time to sleep now, time to give into the nothingness nuzzling against his eyelids and resting against him as warmly and comfortably as a thick blanket.

Time to sleep and never wake up...

" _Turbo!_ " Could that be Vanellope, wailing like that? He had never heard her sound so upset before. A moment later, her tiny hands planted on his cheeks as she unsuccessfully tried to rouse him. "Come on, Pajama Boy, this i-isn't funny! Get up!"

_Vanny. I'm sorry. Seems like no matter what I do, I always end up hurting you..._

He wished that he could have done something for her as she turned around, screaming frantically at the adults, “What’s _happening?!_ Felix, he’s hurt! You have to fix him…!” And then Felix must have taken her aside for a moment to murmur his explanation, but he couldn’t have gotten very far, because Turbo was still hanging on when Vanellope shrieked, “No, _no!_ You’re _wrong!_ We can still help him, I know we can!”

Perhaps a pair of hands grasped the fabric of his jumpsuit; he couldn’t tell, he’d gone numb all over now. “Bo, you are not going anywhere, okay?! Just hang on! We’ve come this far – I know we can do _something_ , and you’re going to be okay, you just have to…!”

But Turbo never heard what it was that he had to do. He almost went under, then felt his mind jolt into lucidity one last time, making a desperate grab at life.  _No, please, I don't want to die! I’m not ready for this! I’m scared…!_

But he’d already made his choice. Time to sleep now. Time to leave the hurt behind.

The darkness crept in, the same darkness that he had risen from a month ago when he'd woken up after his reset, only this time he was certain that it would be much more reluctant to leave. The lights went out…the world went out…and Turbo went out with it.


	18. Worth something

_“Turbo? It’s me. We just finished up in the code vault. Felix said that you’re stronger than he thought at first, ‘cause you didn’t just disintegrate like he was expecting. You never stopped breathing, either, so that must be a good sign…right?_

_“…the grown-ups keep tellin’ me that…that you might not recover enough to wake up…b-but what do they know, right? I mean, they didn’t want me to help you at first, either, ‘cause they thought you’d still be evil! You proved them wrong then, so I know you’re gonna prove them wrong now._

_“Please prove them wrong…”_

* * *

 

_“It’s me again. Um…all the grown-ups went to work, but I didn’t really feel like racing today, so I just went to bed. But then I had this bad dream, and it made me think about you, because maybe you’re having a bad dream right now while you’re sleeping. And I thought, maybe I should stay here, to make you feel better once you wake up…_

* * *

 

_“Hi, I’m back. Sorry I was gone so long…I was just spending some time with Ralph. He always makes me feel a lot better. He told me that hanging around you won’t make you wake up any faster, but I think he’s wrong, because what if you can hear me? I mean, I_ know _you can hear me. A-and you wouldn’t want to keep your president waiting, would you, Pajama Boy?_

_“Would you?...”_

* * *

 

_“I can’t believe it’s been another whole day. Look, ‘Bo, I know you’re a teenager, but this is way too long to oversleep, even for you. Maybe you’re just tired after what happened…I guess I understand that. I haven’t been sleeping real well, either. Maybe I’ll just lay down with you for a little while…”_

* * *

 

_“You know what? After I saved your life, and helped you learn to control your glitch, and forgave you for everything, the least you could do for me is to wake up! You didn’t even warn me that this would happen to you, so how is that fair?!_

_“Can’t you wake up for me…?”_

* * *

 

_“Hello again. Um…I’m gonna be gone a little while. I’m gonna try doing the Random Roster Race again. I still don’t know if I feel like racing, but it’s been a while, and I have sort of missed it. Plus, Ralph said that you wouldn’t want to feel like you were stopping me from racing anymore, and he’s probably right about that._

_“…I do hope you’re gonna wake up…but I’m not so sure what’s gonna happen anymore. Okay, how about I make a deal with you, ‘Bo? If you wake up now, you can come race with me, and be a real racer again just like you wanted. Come on, it’ll be a blast…!_

_“…Still nothing, huh? Well, my offer still stands. I’ll be at the Royal Raceway if you want to come and meet me._

_“M’sorry, Turbo. I tried to help you, I really did, even though the grown-ups told me it would never work. I guess they were right, though not quite like they thought, huh? At least it was fun while it lasted, so…thanks. For what it’s worth, you were a pretty good friend.”_

And someone pressed a quick kiss against his nose.

* * *

 

Turbo shifted wearily, his mind a sticky mixture of old nightmares and recent memories. Plodding his way through the mess, he slowly became aware of his body again, feeling familiar sensations of warmth and comfort and exhaustion. It was a long while before he even realized that he’d emerged from the seemingly endless void that had consumed him, but even figuring that out, he had no sense of where or when he was.

So he opened his eyes.

He had to blink several times in order to force the room into focus –  _his_  room, his bedroom in the Sugar Rush castle. Haltingly, he wiggled his toes, then his fingers, and everything seemed to be present and in working order. Someone had tucked him into bed snugly; that was all he really registered before his eyes sank shut again.

“Turbo?”

His eyes opened, shut once more.

“Hey, come on, Turbo…! Don’t you go falling asleep on me again! It’s time to wake up now…!”

He knew that voice, and somehow, the words were familiar too. It was like – well, it was just like when he’d first woken up after his reset, when everyone was trying to rouse him. Maybe this was the afterlife, but it was all repetition, and now he’d be forced to relive the events of the past month. Now he’d open his eyes and everyone would be afraid of him because they hadn’t gotten to know him yet –

There was a smear of colors gradually solidifying as a small figure seated on the edge of his bed. Turbo squinted, partially out of concentration, partially out of confusion.

"Felix?" he said.

Felix breathed out in elated relief, and the long rush of air communicated more than words ever could. "Oh my land! Turbo, you're okay!" The handyman clapped both hands over his mouth. "You're actually awake!"

"I…" Turbo had one last flash of recollection: Hero’s Duty, the beacon, tempting King Candy off the edge. Then collapsing. He’d been so certain that he was dead, but one more glance at the expression on Felix’s face was enough to make him believe that this was neither a dream nor any sort of afterlife.

_This is real_.

Turbo pushed himself into a sitting position and brushed his hands over his face and head, amazed and delighted at the fact that he was full and intact, and that there was no one else in his mind but him. “I’m alive,” he breathed out incredulously. He was alive, and King Candy was dead, and he was  _alive_  and  _home_...!

"Woah there, kiddo!" Felix's hand clamped down on Turbo's shoulder. "Don't start moving around so fast! Are you feeling dizzy at all? Are you okay?"

"Okay? Okay?!" Turbo found himself laughing. "I'm better than okay! I feel great!" Before he knew it, he had tossed his arms around Felix and enveloped the older character in a hug...overall, an uncharacteristically affectionate gesture for him. Felix tensed slightly with shock, but after a moment, he folded his arms over Turbo's back in a reassuring, genuine embrace.

"Hey." Felix chuckled gently. "What brought this on?"

"What’s it _for_?! It’s for fixing me!" Turbo was no idiot. He understood that his code had been badly damaged by the demise of the malware, and from there, it wasn't difficult to deduce who exactly had put him back together. Suddenly, he sensed a familiar buildup of static within his chest, and the crimson glitch that bubbled through him was also conducted into Felix. "Oops," muttered Turbo, pulling back. "Sorry. Guess I got a little too excited."

Felix was still grinning from ear to ear, his cheeks glowing pink from what was undoubtedly a rush of emotion. Were those beads of moisture at the corners of his eyes...? "Still glitching, huh? I tried to seal up all the gaps in your code while I was repairing you, but I guess that there's some things that even I can't fix."

"It's fine," Turbo assured him, smiling contentedly as he scooted himself into a more upright position. "I’m pretty much used to it by now." Truthfully, though, the slight malfunction had become a part of him in some strange way, to the extent where he would feel slightly incomplete if scarlet pixels and binary didn't crackle against his skin every so often. It was nothing but a harmless little quirk, plus it would give him a bit of an edge in racing, and now it wouldn't even prevent him from leaving the game!

"That's the spirit!" Felix playfully rapped his knuckles against Turbo's helmet. "Oh, I'm so glad to see you awake, kiddo...you have no idea..."

Turbo breathed out, allowing his eyes to slip shut momentarily. The echoes of the intense desolation and fear that had been wracking his mind not so long ago were still sharp and tangible, but it was so much easier to ignore those last unpleasant pangs now that he was home.  _Home._ What an amazing, wonderful word that he had never truly understood the meaning of before...home...he was home, and he was safe, and he wasn't scared anymore.

Well, maybe he was just a touch anxious as he gazed up at Felix with round lemon-colored eyes. "King Candy...the malware, I mean...he's really gone? He's dead, and I'm somehow still alive?"

"Not exactly ‘somehow.’" Felix squeezed the young racer's shoulder, and for once, it didn't even occur to Turbo to shy away from the touch. "The malware was destroyed. You didn’t disintegrate, but your code was extremely weak by the time we got back here. Honestly, it was a close call. We weren’t sure if you’d _ever_ wake up."

"But…now I'm me again." Turbo blinked, dumfounded, and his shoulders lifted slightly as the oppressive weight of his former self seemed to drop away. "King Candy’s gone. And…that means that my memories are gone for good, too.”

"Maybe that’s for the best,” suggested Felix gently.

Turbo's head drooped slightly, and he automatically averted his eyes, but all he said was, “Maybe. I mean, I never chose to have my memories erased, but…I guess I don’t really need them, do I?”

“Of course not,” agreed Felix. “You can just go out and make new ones.”

Make new memories. It was simple; everyone did it during every single day of their lives. Turbo involuntarily brought a hand up to his forehead, as if attempting to survey the contents of his brain, and he realized that everything important was already with him. He had his memories of Turbo Time, which provided him with an identity, a backstory, and a true history to go along with it. He could recollect Jet and Set perfectly well, which may have been painful for him at points, but he certainly would have been much more forlorn if he'd forgotten his old friends entirely. He even remembered "going Turbo," including exactly what had driven him to take such a drastic course of action and what the consequences ultimately were. That was his biggest mistake, and as such, it was only right that he kept it close to his chest and learned from it.

So he had a blanked-out timeframe of about thirty years, so what? The memories he possessed of the time after – meeting the people who would become his surrogate family, developing a friendship with Vanellope, even insignificant little things like getting into whipped cream fights or being teased about his lisp – were some of the most important factors of who he was...of who he had become. Because he wasn't the same as he had once been in Turbo Time, he realized. He was no longer so selfish or so bitter about everything. And he certainly wasn't anywhere close to King Candy; he'd learned of the differences between himself and the malware the hard way.

Felix himself had said that it was memories that made characters who they were. And Turbo had enough memories to ensure that he would always be somebody, somebody who was worth something.

“Thanks, Felix,” he said, and smiled. “For everything. Now, do me one more favor and help me get out of bed."

"What – already?!" Felix crossed his arms. "Listen, young man, given the code reformatting you just endured, I don't think you're ready for that yet – "

Turbo swung his legs over the side of the spongecake mattress. "I'll do it myself if you're not gonna help me!"

"Oh, jiminy jaminy!" Felix smacked his forehead in defeat, before lightly gripping Turbo's arm as the racer eased weight back onto his feet. "Okay, easy now...easy..."

Considering all the trauma that he had been through, both physical and mental, Turbo felt surprisingly steady as he drew himself up to a standing position. He noticed that he was in sock feet, his sneakers presumably discarded in order to make him more comfortable while he was lying comatose in bed. Little glitches flicked through him like minnows in a shallow pond, but it was certainly nothing abnormal. He hardly even felt dizzy.

"Are you doing okay?" inquired Felix fretfully, clasping his gloved hands.

"Yeah, I'm just fine." Suddenly, Turbo sensed the floor vibrating slightly beneath him, and his eyes widened. Either an unexpected earthquake was occurring, or the castle was settling violently, or else...

His third idea was confirmed as the door to his bedroom swung open, allowing the passage of a figure who was so tall that he accidentally snapped off a piece of the gingerbread doorway as he squeezed his way in. Ralph muttered something under his breath that was most likely not appropriate for an E-rated game, brushed the crumbs out of his spiked-up auburn hair, and straightened up to face Turbo with both an arched eyebrow and a small-but-heartfelt smile. "Well, look who finally decided to get out of bed!"

"Finally?" echoed Turbo. "Uh oh. Did another thirty years pass that I should know about?"

Ralph laughed as if Turbo was merely joking around (he sort of was, but only halfway). "Try three days, kid. Still, it's been a long three days, for us anyway. I think it's safe to say that we were all a little freaked out when you just went down like that."

For whatever reason, this reminded Turbo of his brief conversation with Ralph in the tower room, and he fidgeted with his hands as his eyes connected with the wrecker's. "You saved me," he commented. "When I fell and got stuck on the tower, you climbed up and saved me. I meant to thank you, but I never got the chance..."

"Technically I saved you twice, kid," Ralph pointed out. "The first time was when King Candy tried to play games with in the forest, and the second time was on the building."

"Oh. You're right." Turbo blinked. "Um...double thank you, then?"

"Double you're welcome." Ralph lifted his blocky fist in an offering gesture. "Top shelf?"

Turbo grinned to himself as he tapped his knuckles against Ralph's, his tiny white hand barely the width of one of the antagonist's fingers. "Top shelf."

Felix had placed a hand over his heart, and the expression on his face suggested that he might have been watching a tickle fight between two adorable kittens. "Oh, how sweet!" he practically chirped. "I'm so glad to see that you two have patched things up. Really, you don't know how happy it makes me. But Turbo, I think that you should get some rest, at least for a little while longer..."

"Wait." Turbo's smile instantly vanished as he pieced together what was wrong with this scene. Felix was here being his flustered and fatherly self, and even Ralph had stepped in to show he cared, but the one person who Turbo had expected to be tackling him to the ground in a hug by now was absent. "Where's Vanellope?"

Ralph and Felix exchanged an unreadable glance.

"She's prepping for the Random Roster Race," Ralph answered slowly. "It's her first time racing since...well, you know, since what happened a few days ago. We've been trying to ease her back into a normal routine. I was actually just about to head down to the Royal Raceway when I heard your voice in here, so I – "

"I have to see her right away!" interrupted Turbo. Oh no, poor Vanny, forced to spend a torturous amount of time believing that her friend was dead or dying or would never wake up again...he shuddered internally at the thought of how he would have reacted if the situation were reversed.

Felix's hand slipped around Turbo's shoulder once more. "We'll bring her up here as soon as she finishes with the race," promised the handyman.

"No, that's not good enough! I have to see her now!" Turbo insisted. "I can't let her go through a whole Random Roster Race thinking that I'm dead!"

"I'm sort of with the kid on this one, Felix," Ralph remarked, drawing a blocky thumb across his chin. "You and I both know how upset Vanellope's been, so what's the harm in letting him see her?"

Felix crossed his arms tightly over his chest in what was obviously an attempt to appear stern and forbidding. "Turbo is still recovering from several major code adjustments. He needs time to rest and recuperate. There's no way that he can walk the distance to the Royal Raceway, and in his condition, he can't drive either!"

An agitated breath hissed between Turbo's teeth. He was about to shout a proclamation that he would get himself to the Random Roster Race whether the adults approved of it or not, but he was stopped by another voice, this one an adult woman's, speaking from the doorway.

"Oh, you need a ride? That's not a problem, champ." As if for emphasis, Sergeant Calhoun hoisted a familiar folded black device upwards, giving it a yank on the shoulder strap. She really did seem to carry her cruiser everywhere with her. Maybe it wasn't exactly Turbo's preferred method of transportation, but in a pinch like this, when he could neither drive nor walk very far...

He flashed his lopsided grin at her, revealing a few inches of his dull yellow teeth. "Just let me grab my shoes."

* * *

 

The atmosphere around the Royal Raceway was noticeably more subdued than it usually was. It was early enough that only a few racers were milling about, but all of them were speaking in hushed tones to one another and had concerned expressions knit into their cherubic faces. They were discussing the listless state of their president, possibly, or else spreading rumors about how exactly that whole King Candy business had ended. Even the spectators, who were more or less programmed to react to what was placed in front of them instead of thinking on their own, shifted uneasily in their respective candy-box bleachers, reflecting the overall somber and anxious mood of the day.

Turbo was seated next to Ralph in the Assorted Fans area, which was markedly emptier than normal, and he was incessantly pattering his fingers against his knees or thumping his feet on the ground. Once or twice, his overabundance of energy even caused himto flicker and glitch. "Where  _is_ she?" he muttered, his eyes roaming restlessly over the track once again, but there was still no sign of Vanellope.

"Take a chill pill, kid," said Ralph. "She'll get here. I just hope that you're prepared to be tackled and/or suffocated when she sees you."

Honestly, at this point her absence was weighing so heavily on Turbo that he would have been thrilled even if she accidentally strangled him with a hug. He never got a chance to say this, however, because at that moment he caught sight of four more of the racer children tromping onto the track. Like all of the others, they appeared to be uncharacteristically skittish, and they seemed to be making an attempt to comfort one little girl who they had all grouped around...his breath hitched.

The racers weren't so far away, and he was getting much better at identifying them by sight alone, so he was able to take a mental survey of who exactly he was looking at. There was Candlehead, instantly recognizable by her signature headgear. Rancis Fluggerbutter and Gloyd Orangeboar were shuffling their feet in the cocoa dirt. And of course the hot pink one was Taffyta, who was sympathetically patting the shoulder of...

"I'm okay, you guys. Really," mumbled Vanellope halfheartedly. She didn't look anywhere close to okay. Wisps of her black hair had escaped her ponytail and were drifting around her head, and the fact that she seemed more interested in her shoes than her friends didn't do much to hide the dark circles and around her eyes. She dragged the sleeve of her hoodie across her nose. "I know that I shouldn't be gettin' all worked up or anything, but..."

"Are you sure that you're up for racing?" asked Taffyta worriedly. Whatever Turbo might have thought of her, it was obvious that she really did care about her friend. "Maybe you should sit out one more day, just to be safe..."

"No! No, I can race." Vanellope wagged her head back and forth rapidly. "I'm not gonna let this interfere with my job anymore...even though Turbo should have been here, too..." She turned her face away. "I-I thought we'd be racing together by now..."

"Turbo?" repeated Rancis incredulously. He and Gloyd were both staring into the crowd of spectators in astonishment, specifically gazing at the white racer who was leaning over the side of a divider in order to hear the conversation. "Um, Vanellope..."

Vanellope made a frustrated sound in the back of her throat. "How many times to I have to tell you guys that he's not the same person as King Candy?! King Candy was an evil chunk of malware, and Turbo’s just a kid who wants to race like us! He's my friend, and after what he did to make sure that King Candy wouldn't come after us anymore...!"

Taffyta was staring now too. "Vanellope, that's not what we're talking about..."

"Look! Look!" squealed Candlehead, tugging on Vanellope's hood like an excitable toddler.

Vanellope pulled away from her friends in disgust, clenching her pudgy little fists as she strode away from them. "Just forget I said anything, okay?!" She stomped past the Assorted Fans area, not looking up once, so she didn't see Turbo staring at her with eyes so wide that they looked ready to fall out of his head, overflowing to the brim with so many different emotions that he felt as if his heart would burst...

"Are you really gonna race without me, glitter-graphics?" he found himself saying.

He saw her freeze in her tracks, stiffening abruptly, as if trying to process what she had just heard. For several long moments, she didn't move a muscle. Then, slowly, slowly, she turned her head to peer over her shoulder, her hazel eyes even more enormous than usual.

She saw Turbo practically about to jump over the barrier, smiling at her expectantly.

She stopped.

Her lips parted as if to form words, but no sound came out.

And then...

Vanellope speed-glitched herself over to Turbo so rapidly that he saw her as nothing more than a flash of cerulean lightning, but when he felt her arms tightening like a vice around his ribcage, he returned the embrace immediately. She still had that sweet-vanilla scent to her, and she was as cuddly as a plush doll. Her face was smothered in his chest, but even that didn't completely muffle the sounds she was making – at first he thought she was sobbing, but that was actually only half-right, because she was laughing as well.

"Y-you...you...you dumb pajama boy!" she finally burst out, her fingers digging into the fabric of his jumpsuit. "You scared me  _so much_! I thought you were  _dead!_ I thought you were never gonna wake up, and now you just show up here like nothing happened, and…!” She shook her head, tears squeezing out of her eyes.

Turbo breathed out shakily. “Yeah. Uh, I didn’t mean to freak you out or anything, but when I woke up the grown-ups said you were gone and I just wanted to see you as soon as possible. So…”

He cut himself off as she squeezed him even tighter, and decided that maybe just hugging her would be the best thing he could do right now. Sometimes words weren’t enough to comfort. The grown-ups were gaping slightly at seeing the two racers clinging to each other, probably thinking that they’d never expected to witness this in a lifetime, and honestly, Turbo would have agreed with them there. He’d been pretty touch-averse for most of his life. This kind of affection wasn't in his code.

_But I'm not who I was anymore..._

At last, Vanellope's managed to draw in a deep, shuddering breath, and she drew herself up to face him. "You are such a moron, Turbo! You  _knew_  that if we killed King Candy it would hurt you, and you went ahead and did it anyway?! Could you get any dumber?!"

"Well, what was I s'posed to do?" he retorted. "I wasn't about to let him get to you!"

“You could’ve at least _said_ something!”

“There was no time!” He huffed as if exasperated, but in reality, there was still a persistent little smile on his face. “But for what it’s worth…I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” she assured him. “I know you were just trying to – ”

"Not just for that, Vanny.” He stepped back so that he could look her in the eyes, his expression turning somber, with maybe just a hint of unavoidable guilt. "For everything."

She hesitated, perhaps processing the sheer amount of misdeeds that he was apologizing for, and then shook her head quickly. "Bo..." But the graveness of his expression kept her from denying that an apology was necessary, so she said, "I forgive you. For everything."

And with that, she tossed her arms around his neck and wrapped him up in another hug.

Turbo exhaled as his own arms closed around her, a sense of peace washing through him from head to toe. If it had been possible for him to capture this moment of bliss and exist within it forever, then he would have. For the first time in his life, everything seemed to be in alignment. He had a home. He had a family. And he had Vanny...which, after all of the events that had transpired between them, both past and present, seemed like the greatest achievement of all.

He wasn't sure how long the two of them stayed like that before he heard someone pointedly clearing their throat. Both he and Vanellope started at the sound, which seemed to have emanated from a cluster of Sugar Rush racers peering over at them with curious eyes.

"What are you guys looking at?" demanded Vanellope.

"Him," responded Candlehead helpfully, aiming her finger in Turbo's direction. He scowled to himself as he anticipated what would come next, a barrage of not-unjustified hateful remarks possibly coupled with more teasing about his glitch, but instead the little girl continued with, "You really died to get rid of King Candy?! And then you came back to life?! That's so cool!"

Turbo blinked, rippling with a startled glitch. "...what?"

Gloyd Orangeboar was the next to speak. "Vanellope was telling us about what happened! I can't believe you actually helped defeat that giant King Candy Cy-Bug thing! That's awesome! How did you do it?!"

"Um, I didn't – "

"I bet you used your glitch, right?!" exclaimed Candlehead. "You zapped yourself away from him!"

Vanellope grinned and leapt to her feet as she joined the conversation. "Yeah, he did! We figured out that we could turn on the beacon to get rid of all the Cy-bugs, and King Candybug transformed back into his regular King Candy self, and then Turbo lured him over to the edge of the building and  _glitched_  his way out! Just like I taught him to!"

"Cool!" proclaimed Rancis. "You can glitch your way out of the game, too, can't you?"

"Yeah, I can." Turbo was still gaping visibly, taken completely off-guard. He could take insults, and he knew exactly how to react to people picking on him. But never in a million years had he expected these children to actually act as if they were _accepting_ him.

Taffyta Muttonfudge, the only racer in the group who hadn't spoken yet, twirled her ever-present lollipop between her fingers and glanced up at him with an expression that could only be described as coolly intrigued. "So, when are you coming to race with us?" she inquired.

"Uh..." For some reason Turbo's brain seemed to latch onto a more logical response when it came to questions about racing, and he looked over his shoulder at Vanellope, his mouth curling into a slight, hopeful smile. "How about tomorrow?"

She grinned and flashed him a thumbs-up of approval. "Whenever you're ready, Pajama Boy."

"I'm always ready to race. But I think that I'll wait until tomorrow, or else Felix will have a cow."

She laughed delightedly, her tears all but entirely forgotten. "Then tomorrow can't come fast enough! You're gonna love the Random Roster Race, I just know it!"

"Speaking of the Random Roster Race," interjected Ralph, lumbering back from the spot he had moved to in order to give the children some privacy, "isn't it about time that you got a move on with it, President Fart-feathers? You don't wanna keep your people waiting, and Turbo will still be here when you're done!"

And indeed, the other fourteen Sugar Rush avatars had all assembled their karts into their normal organized formation, and twenty-eight eyes fixated on Vanellope expectantly as they awaited the start of the race. Some of Vanellope's uncertainty seemed to return, and her fist once again closed around Turbo's sleeve. "Yeah, I...I’ll get right on it…" It was clear that she was reluctant to leave the friend who she'd believed to be dead.

"Go ahead, glitter-graphics," Turbo urged her. "Your citizens await! Besides, I'll be right here, watching you race. Go out there and win a big gold trophy for me, because come tomorrow, I'll be beating your butt on the track! Got it?"

To his relief, she giggled and gave his hand one last affectionate squeeze before flouncing off to join her fellow racers. "You wish!"

Turbo sighed deeply, as if expelling all of his worries and fears in one huge rush of air, and sank back down into his seat on the bleachers. He was admittedly rather tired; it seemed that there had been something to Felix's warnings after all. But he could last the length of the Random Roster Race. He'd get to see Vanellope out there and enjoying herself after all of the trauma that they'd endured, and afterwards, the two of them would be together again...together and finally free...

"You all right there, kid?" asked Ralph.

"Yeah." Turbo turned to face the wrecker with a fatigued yet contented smile, realizing that it no longer bothered him when people referred to him as "kid" or "kiddo." He  _was_  a kid, after all, and now he felt that it was safe for him to act his age, since he had a family to look out for him. There were people in the world who cared about him, who would protect him from harm, who would miss him when he was gone...who would never forget about him or abandon him, ever. Even if it was just a few characters in the whole entire arcade, his odd little family was more important than entire crowds of people cheering his name, or dozens of gamers high-fiving each other as they leaned over his cabinet. This must have been the feeling that Vanellope had described to him, all those weeks ago. For the first time in his life, Turbo truly felt that he was worth something.

And there was no better feeling in the universe than that. Even winning first place didn't come close.

"Are you  _sure_  you're okay?" Ralph pressed. "You look...I dunno...kind of spaced out."

"I'm fine, Ralph." Turbo's mouth stretched into his signature grin, and he flicked his thumb into the air. "I'm just Turbo-Tastic."


	19. Epilogue

At the Royal Raceway, preparations for the daily Random Roster Race were in full swing. Synthesized electronic trumpets blared their usual refrain, the sentient candy fans cheered and jumped and wiggled their hands in the air from their seats in the candy-box bleachers, and the fourteen star characters of the game – the racers themselves – had lined up beneath the tall popcorn box beside the starting line. A particularly sharp-eyed observer might be interested to note that there was one additional figure hanging on the fringes of the crowd, almost entirely white, clutching his gold coin with trepidation and gazing upwards with doleful yellow eyes. Then again, such an observer would probably also happen to spot the three anomalies in the "Assorted Fans" section of the audience: a massive square wrecker with a mess of spiky auburn hair, a pint-sized handyman with a golden hammer tucked snugly into his belt, and a tall woman dressed in full battle armor, up to and including weaponry. This was no ordinary iteration of Sugar Rush, after all.

Sour Bill, eyes half-closed and body language droll, the faint cracks in his hard candy surface all healed up, spoke into the microphone from the top of the popcorn box. "Citizens of Sugar Rush...all hail our rightful ruler, President Vanellope von Schweetz."

Vanellope tore back the red curtain surrounding her spot on box eagerly. She wore her typical ratty old hoodie, candy wrapper skirt, and mismatched leggings, because she was a  _president_ and not a princess, and nobody was ever going to forget that fact while she was around. "Hello, everybody!" she shouted, snatching the microphone out of Sour Bill's hand without even a glance in her assistant's direction. "Welcome to the Random Roster Race! I'm sure that everybody's eager to get started, I know I am, but sit tight 'cause we have a lot of announcements to go through!

"First of all...I'm sure that everybody's wondering about all that stuff with King Candy."

A hush enveloped both the racers and the crowd. No one could ever forget about what the false king had done to them for fifteen full years, after all, and many of them also had all-too-recent memories of being threatened or even injured when the false monarch had made his return a few days ago. Then King Candy had vanished once more, but the sugary land was still disrupted by its president's seemed state of mourning. Today was the first day that she really seemed like herself again, and so she was finally ready to lay all of the rumors to rest.

"Let me set the record straight. That wasn't King Candy, it was just some mean ol' malware running around in King Candy's character model. And it's officially gone, so we never have to worry about it anymore, ever!"

Everyone seemed to exhale a collective sigh of relief, before bursting into cheers at this proclamation.

"Okay, okay, settle down, I'm not done!" Vanellope hushed them irritably. "Second, most of you probably noticed that I've been pretty, well, sad for a couple days. It's because a close friend of mine got really hurt by King Candy, and I was worried that he would, you know...but he's okay now, too!"

The candy spectators cheered again at this, but the fourteen avatars were quiet. They knew exactly who Vanellope's "close friend" was, and many of them found their eyes drifting over to the white figure, who was staring up at Vanellope as if trying to convince himself that nothing else in the world existed.

"But here's the thing!" yelled the little president over the noise of the fans. "My close friend is Turbo."

All of the jovial noise cut out abruptly.

Turbo had been awaiting and dreading this announcement ever since he'd first brought his car to the track and lined it up beside Vanellope's, before gathering with the other racers to listen to the day's announcements. He knew that today would be the day that his presence was officially revealed, or "the day that he became a part of Sugar Rush," as his family had been phrasing it in an attempt to calm his nerves. But his name was synonymous with "evil King Candy" here. Even if the racers were now starting to act more curious than frightened around him, there was no way that he'd be accepted by the entire populace of the game...

The silence following his best friend's words confirmed his worst fears, and he hugged the gold coin he'd borrowed earlier against his chest, flickering red from a minor nervous glitch.

Vanellope frowned as she gazed out over her suddenly subdued subjects, then cleared her throat pointedly. "Yeah, yeah, we all know the name Turbo. And I'm sure that a lot of you think that you know what Turbo is like, too. But here's the thing: for fifteen years, you also thought that you knew who  _I_  was. It turns out that even a glitch can turn out to be a princess in disguise."

Uneasy rustling was the only response.

"Turbo isn't bad!" she continued. "He isn't evil, he isn't a virus, and he isn't King Candy. He's just a racer. And so, it is now my presidential decree that he is going to come racing with us, and you're all going to treat him just like you'd treat any other normal person! Give him a chance to prove himself, and you'll see..."

Turbo's eyes had become downfallen during this speech, so he was taken aback when he heard sparse clapping emanating from somewhere not too far away. When he lifted his head, he saw that the other fourteen avatars were all applauding, throwing smiles over their shoulders at him that were either shy or nervous or challenging, welcoming him to their team in the best way that they knew how. Even Taffyta managed to drum up enough enthusiasm to tap her hands together a few times, although the expression that she directed at Turbo was far from friendly. Well, maybe that would change in time, just as it had with Ralph and Sergeant Calhoun and everyone else.

Hesitantly, the spectators began to clap as well, although it seemed more out of obligation than because they actually saw that there was reason to celebrate. But there were three people whose genuine heartfelt sentiment could not be ignored. Turbo was no lip-reader, but when he stared into the "Assorted Fans" area, he was able to get the gist of what his family was saying to him to urge him on...

" _...kick some tail for us, champ!"_

" _Come on, kiddo, you know you've got this..."_

" _...proud of you...we're all proud of you..."_

Turbo smiled and waved his hand towards them, acknowledging their encouragement. He felt slightly calmer now, but there was still one more issue to resolve, and it was unfortunately a fairly large one: tossing in his coin to become a part of the lineup for the race.

"TAFFYTA MUTTONFUDGE!"

"GLOYD ORANGEBOAR!"

"CITRUSELLA FLUGPUCKER!"

"SNOWANNA RAINBEAU!..."

The line of racers inched up gradually as each flung their coin into the winner's cup, then bounced off to their respective vehicle. The crowd's excitement was beginning to reach normal pre-race levels again. Still, Turbo hung back, shuffling his feet and gripping his coin so tightly that its engravings would probably leave imprints in his fingertips, crackling with glitches every now and then. When someone came up behind him and gently took his hand, he flinched and nearly cried out.

"Relax, Pajama Boy. It's just me." Vanellope smiled slightly as she stepped up beside him, her own token dangling lightly from one hand. "Don't look so nervous! Everything's gonna be fine, and you saw that everyone's at least willing to give you a chance!"

He drew in a tense breath and nodded, but worry was still knit into his features. "What if it puts King Candy's name on the board again?" he asked tremulously.

"If it does, who cares?" She arched her eyebrows at him, shooting him a knowing look. "You know who you are, Turbo." With that, she skipped forward and flipped her coin nonchalantly, and the announcer's voice was practically swelling with pride as it declared her name.

Turbo allowed the last of his reservations to melt away, and he took a bold step forward. Yes, he did know who he was. It had taken a while, but he finally had an identity of his very own, one that he no longer felt the need to change in order to receive praise or con other people into adoring him.

He was a lot of things. He was a glitch, he was a kid, he was Vanellope's friend, and there was still a confident part of his programming that would always cause him to think of himself as the greatest racer ever. Even if that wasn't entirely true, he was most certainly a racer, down to his very code. And there were also many things that he most certainly wasn't: he wasn't malware, he wasn't evil, and he definitely wasn't King Candy. And most of all, he wasn't a ghost boy.

All he had needed was for someone to see him, to reassure him that he wasn't invisible. And he had found that someone in the form of the girl who was now smirking at him from the sidelines, wordlessly beckoning him to come forth.

He knew who he was. He was himself, and even if "himself" meant being a three-foot-ten glitchy child, then other people were just going to have to deal with that.

And apparently the jumbotron agreed, because when his coin flew from his fingertips and bounced into the winner's cup, a single word rolled out that made his face stretch into a yellow-toothed grin and automatically seemed to pry his thumb into his signature gesture:

"TURBO!"

 

_Fin_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dedicated to all the fans of this story who have stayed loyal throughout the years, and a special thank you to my girlfriend - if you hadn't decided to draw some Ghost Boy fan art five years ago, we wouldn't be dating now.


End file.
